What's Wrong with the British Constitution?

W H AT ’ S W RO N G W I T H T H E B R I T I S H CONSTITUTION?

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? IA IN M C L EA N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Iain McLean 2010 Chapter 3: Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan Chapter 4: Iain McLean and Jennifer Nou Chapter 5: Iain McLean and Tom Lubbock The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–954695–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents Preface List of Tables List of Figures List of Abbreviations

vii xi xiii xiv

PART I: THE OLD CONSTITUTION: TWO APPROACHES Introduction

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1. The English Public Lawyers’ Constitution

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2. A Fresh Start: Veto Players, Win Sets, and Constitutional Moments

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PART II: THE CONSTITUTION FROM BELOW 3. 1707 and 1800: a Treaty (Mostly) Honoured and a Treaty Broken Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan 4. Why Should We Be Beggars with the Ballot in Our Hand? Iain McLean and Jennifer Nou 5. The Curious Incident of the Guns in the Night Time Iain McLean and Tom Lubbock Appendix to Chapter 5. How Much Did Bonar Law Know About the Larne Gunrunning? 6. The Contradictions of Professor Dicey 7. Causes and Consequences of the Unionist Coup d’E´tat

47 86 100 126 128 142

PART III: THE EROSION OF DICEYAN IDEOLOGY 8. The Impact of UK Devolution

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9. The European Union and Other Supranational Entanglements

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10. Human Rights Appendix to Chapter 10. European Convention on Human Rights and Protocols Adopted by the United Kingdom as of 2008

201 215

PART IV: THINGS TO LEAVE OUT OF A WRITTEN CONSTITUTION 11. Unelected Houses 223 12. Monarchs 251 Appendix to Chapter 12. ‘The Constitutional Position of the Sovereign’: Letters between King George V and Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, Autumn 1913 273 13. Established Churches

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PART V: THINGS TO PUT IN 14. We the People

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Notes Dramatis personae References Index

337 351 357 373

Preface Well, what is wrong with the British Constitution? For a start, nobody knows what it is. That is not to say (as people often and lazily do) that it is unwritten. Parts of it are very written indeed. Nobody ever denies that the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, which limit the right of the unelected House of Lords to amend bills sent up by the elected House of Commons, are part of the constitution. Those Acts also set the maximum possible time between general elections, which is as fundamental a constitutional rule as one can imagine. Without it, there would be nothing to prevent the House of Commons from prolonging its existence indefinitely. Equally, the Representation of the People and Parliamentary Constituencies Acts are undoubtedly part of the Constitution. These Acts determine who is allowed to vote, and how the boundaries of the single-member districts in which they vote are to be drawn. Another class of constitutional legislation ratifies international treaties which define the very extent or powers of the UK government and parliament. The Act of Union 1706, still in force, is the third of a triplet of documents that created Great Britain as we know it by uniting the legislatures of England and Scotland. These three documents are normally confused and conflated, especially by English commentators. The European Communities Act 1972 and the European Communities (Amendment) Acts 1986 and subsequently define the terms of the UK’s membership of the European Union. Slightly further from the core of the constitution lie, for instance, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000. These Acts give individual rights against government and public bodies. To some people, this is an essentially constitutional matter. Similar protections of individual rights were added very early in the life of the US Constitution. The Constitution was ratified in 1788, but several of the ratifying states complained that it needed to be strengthened by a set of amendments protecting individual rights. Some of them tried to make their ratification conditional on a bill of rights. Ten such amendments were ratified in 1791, and they are indeed known as the US ‘Bill of Rights’. Some of them echo rights asserted by Parliament in the English Bill of Rights Act 1689. Other constitutionalists, however, would deny that Acts such as the Human Rights Acts either are or should be regarded as part of the constitution. Unlike the US Bill of Rights, they are in fact subject to repeal and amendment just like any other Act of Parliament. But then, so is the Act of Union 1706,

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so this in itself does not establish a difference. The difference is rather normative: some people argue that while the Act of Union needs to have a special status, the Human Rights and Freedom of Information Acts are in a different normative category. The magic circle of those entitled to say what the constitution is includes judges, law professors, and a few journalists. One important move is by those judges who discover constitutional principles in the common law. This book will examine the most prominent recent effort of this sort, by Sir John Laws, who has been a Lord Justice of Appeal since 1999. However, the custodians of the magic circle have always been reluctant to allow political scientists into it. ‘We live,’ said the constitutional commentator and journalist Sidney Low in 1904, ‘under a system of tacit understandings. But the understandings themselves are not always understood’ (Low 1904: 12). An example discussed in this book is that in May 1950 an anonymous letter writer calling himself ‘Senex’ wrote to The Times about the terms on which a UK monarch may or may not refuse a dissolution of parliament to the Prime Minister. Normally, anonymous letters to the papers have little authority. Nowadays the serious papers refuse to publish them at all, except from whistle-blowers, victims of sexual abuse, and so on. However, to those in the know, it appears that ‘Senex’ was the king’s private secretary; and that the doctrines he announced ‘in so far as this matter can be publicly discussed’ (Senex 1950) form part of the British Constitution. Those content with the idea that a constitution may be defined by anonymous letter writers to the papers will probably find this book very annoying and should perhaps stop reading now. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the invisible college of friends and colleagues who have helped me with this book. As I trespass into fields not my own, I am more indebted than usual to the following, who have all made constructive comments, or helped with requests for information, or both: Bruce Ackerman, Andrew Adonis, James Alt, Nick Bamforth, Hugh Bayley MP, Richard Bellamy, Thom Brooks, Roger Congleton, Nick Crafts, Frank Cranmer, Dennis Galligan, Brigid Hadfield, David Hayton, Cameron Hazlehurst, Gwilym Hughes, Doug Irwin, Peter Jay, Tony King, Ce´cile Laborde, Laurence Lustgarten, Neil MacCormick, Diarmaid Macculloch, Marjory MacLean, David Marquand, Bob Morris, Ruairi O’Donnell, Scot Peterson, Jack Rakove, Julian Rivers, David Robertson, John Robertson, Meg Russell, Maria Sciara, Hew Strachan, Alan Trench, Albert Weale, Stuart White, Stewart Wood, and Alison Young. Like everyone else in this field, I was deeply saddened by the death of Sir Neil MacCormick in April 2009. He had been a role model for me from the moment I arrived in Oxford as a naive 18-year-old, who had scarcely ever

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left Scotland. Neil was then a Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol College and a glittering prizewinner in the Oxford Union and elsewhere. He was one of the inspirations of this project and offered it his warm and practical support throughout. I tried out themes from the book at numerous academic seminars. I am very grateful to organizers, respondents, and those who commented, at: University College, London Constitution Unit seminar University of Essex Government seminar University of Edinburgh Scottish History seminar Australian National University Politics Program, Research School of Social Sciences seminar.

Finally, the Oxford University Public Policy Unit kindly hosted a one-day workshop to discuss the complete draft manuscript in February 2009. I am very grateful to the historians and lawyers (especially) who dissected the historical and legal claims in the book and put them under (sometimes withering) scrutiny. They bear no responsibility for the results. I used several archives, listed in the References at the end. All were helpful, but without making invidious distinctions I wish especially to thank the archivists at the National Archives of Australia; Churchill College, Cambridge; Nuffield College, Oxford, and the Royal Archives, Windsor, for dealing with my questions. The Royal Archives are quoted by the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Whilst writing this book, I was also working on two main concurrent projects. The first is Options for a New Britain, published in March 2009, for which I acknowledge financial support from the Economic & Social Research Council under research grant RES-177-25-0003; Gatsby Charitable Trust; John Fell Fund, Oxford University; and Gwilym Gibbon Fund, Nuffield College. The second is the Independent Expert Group reporting to the Calman Commission of the Scottish Parliament on options to reform or replace the Barnett Formula. The three projects are mutually supportive. I therefore acknowledge the support of my Options research officers, Varun Uberoi and Adam Coutts (Adam also helped with copy preparation for this book); my Options and Barnett co-authors, Guy Lodge and Katie Schmuecker; my fellow members of the Independent Expert Group; and the Commissioners and secretariat of the Calman Commission. I thank Lluis Orriols for compiling Figure 11.1 with his signature cheerfulness and enthusiasm. Three chapters emanate from joint work with colleagues or former students. I thank Jennifer Nou, Alistair McMillan, and Tom Lubbock for

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their work on those chapters. With those exceptions, I take full responsibility for all errors and omissions. Finally, a note on references. This book draws on three main academic disciplines: political science, law, and history. Each has a different standard method of referencing. I have standardized on the Harvard author–date system, which most political scientists use. Historical references can be assimilated to the Harvard system fairly easily, but in deference to historians I retain a few more footnotes than a political science book would normally have. Law references are more difficult. Lawyers have a unique referencing system. I have taken the liberty of changing the form of citation of law review articles to the Harvard style. There are no separate Tables of Statutes or of Cases, but all statutes and cases referred to are given their full legal citation forms, where available on standard databases, in the general index. Additional note, July 2009. Vernon Bogdanor’s eagerly-awaited The New British Constitution (Oxford: Hart Publishing 2009) is just out. It modifies some positions he has previously taken, which are criticized in this book; but it is too late for me to change the main text of this book.

List of Tables 3.1 Party identification and voting in the Scottish Parliament 1703 and 1706.

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3.2 Membership of the Estates and voting in the Scottish Parliament on the First Article of the Act of Union.

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3.3 Petitioning and vote-switching in the Scottish Parliament 1703–6.

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3.4 Vote on Article 4 (free trade) and vote-switching in the Scottish Parliament 1703–6.

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3.5 Voting on the First Article in the Scottish Parliament compared to Darien stockholding.

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3.6 Voting on the Fifteenth Article (providing an ‘Equivalent’) in the Scottish Parliament compared to Darien stockholding.

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3.7 Government long-term borrowing (1704–8).

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3.8 Irish national debt, 1794–1801.

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3.9 The bi-dimensionality of Irish politicians’ attitudes, c. 1799.

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5.1 Seats, votes, and proportionality: UK general elections 1906–10.

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5.2 Unionist constitutional arguments 1911–14. 5.3 The Unionist coup d’e´tat 1913–14.

114 117

5.4 Religion and politics in Ulster 1914.

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5.5 Veto plays by UK monarchs.

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8.1 Knowledge of Welsh.

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8.2 The Needs Assessment 1979 (data relate to 1976–7).

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8.3 Population, electorate, and seats in the House of Commons, nations of the United Kingdom, 2005.

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9.1 The UK referendum on Europe 1975: public perceptions of Yes and No advocates.

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10.1 Declarations of incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights issued by UK courts since entry into force of the Human Rights Act 1998.

210

11.1 Mackay Commission models for a partly elected upper house.

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11.2 Votes in the House of Commons (including tellers) on Lords reform, 4 February 2003.

239

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11.3 House of Lords reform: main party statements in the general election of 2005.

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11.4 Divisions in the House of Commons on Lords reform 2007, by party.

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11.5 Outcome of government proposals initially defeated in Lords, 1999–2005.

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11.6 Policy significance of government defeats in Lords, 1999–2005.

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11.7 Electorate of the 12 standard regions of the United Kingdom, with illustrative numbers of Senators for each in an elected upper house, electing by thirds.

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12.1 Unelected versus elected heads of state in C20: protecting versus damaging democracy.

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12.2 The current UK dynasty as heads of state.

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12.3 The electoral system for the President of Ireland may eliminate a Condorcet winner.

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12.4 Australian Deliberative Poll: before-and-after opinion on the ballot proposition.

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12.5 Australian Deliberative Poll: first preferences.

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13.1 Number of persons present at the most numerously attended services on Sunday 30 March 1851.

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13.2 The UK population: by religion, April 2001.

292

13.3 GB religious belonging and attendance, 1964–2005.

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13.4 Attitudes to homosexuality by religion, 2005.

306

13.5 Attitudes to the monarchy by religion, 2005.

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14.1 Does the UK Parliament protect discrete and insular minorities from the tyranny of the majority?

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14.2 Bias in the UK electoral system: the Parliaments of 1951 and February 1974.

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List of Figures 11.1 Unionist share of the vote in by-elections, December 1910–August 1914 (grouped).

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11.2 Peers’ and public views on factors considered ‘very important’ to Lords’ legitimacy, October 2007.

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List of Abbreviations AV

Alternative Vote

BES

British Election Survey

BNP

British National Party

BSA

British Social Attitudes

CBE

Commander of the Order of the British Empire

DCA

Department of Constitutional Affairs

ECHR

European Convention on Human Rights

ECtHR

European Court of Human Rights

ECJ

European Court of Justice

EEC

European Economic Community

EU

European Union

IRA

Irish Republican Army

JCHR

Joint Committee on Human Rights

JCPC

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

JP

Justice of the Peace

MSP

Member of the Scottish Parliament

NIRA

National Industrial Recovery Act

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

QMV

Qualified Majority Voting

SEA

Single European Act

SNP

Scottish National Party

STV

Single Transferable Vote

SVR

Scottish Variable Rate

UVF

Ulster Volunteer Force

WLQ

West Lothian Question

Part I The Old Constitution: Two Approaches

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Introduction Yet if he [Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland] should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. (Declaration of Arbroath, 1320, translation at http://heritage.scotsman.com/declarationofarbroath/ The-text-of-the-Declaration.2600645.jp. Original Latin text available at http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/arbroath_latin.html) For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under. (Speech of Col. Thomas Rainborough at Putney Debates, October 1647; text (modernized spelling) at http://courses.essex.ac.uk/cs/cs101/PUTNEY.HTM) There is nocht tua nations vndir the firmament that ar mair contrar and different fra vthirs, nor is inglis men and scottis men quhoubeit that thai be vitht in ane ile and nythtbours, and of ane langage: for inglis men ar subtil and scottis men ar facile, inglis men ar ambitius in prosperite, and scottis men ar humain in prosperite. inglis men ar humil quhen thai ar subieckit be forse and violence, and scottis men ar furious quhen thai ar violently subiekit[.] inglis men ar cruel quhene thai get victorie, and

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? scottis men ar merciful quhen thai get victorie. and to conclude it is onpossibil that scottis men and inglis men can remane in concord vndir ane monarche or one prince be cause there naturis and conditions ar as indefferent as is the nature of scheip and voluis [wolves]. (Complaynt of Scotland, c. 1549, at http://www.scotsindependent.org/features/scots/complaynt/chap13.htm).

This book is about how four neighbours of two (main) isles and one (main) language have remained, more or less, in concord for three centuries. It may or may not be true that Englishmen are humble when they are subjected by force and violence, and cruel when they get victory, but in constitutional matters this book shows that Englishmen (they are mostly men) tend to be far from humble; therefore they systematically misunderstand and misrepresent the British Constitution. The traditional story of the British (English, United Kingdom) Constitution does not make sense. It purports to be both positive and normative: that is, to describe both how people actually behave and how they ought to behave. It fails to do either. It is not a correct description and it has no persuasive force. This book offers a reasoned alternative. The UK government’s 2007 Green Paper, The Governance of Britain (HM Government 2007), starts down the road proposed in this book, but it does not go nearly far enough. The succeeding White Paper (HM Government 2008a) was widely regarded as backsliding—for instance, in rejecting change to the role of Attorney-General. One aim of this book is to encourage policy-makers to be bold—and consistent. The view that still dominates the thoughts of constitutional lawyers is parliamentary sovereignty (or supremacy). According to this view, the supreme lawgiver in the United Kingdom is Parliament. Some writers in this tradition go on to insist that Parliament in turn derives its authority from the people, for the people elect Parliament. An obvious problem with this view is that Parliament, to a lawyer, comprises three houses: monarch, Lords, and Commons. The people elect only one of those three houses. However, the rival idea that the people themselves are sovereign is ancient, as my first two epigraphs show. The Declaration of Arbroath was written in 1320. It was addressed by fifty Scots barons to the pope at Avignon, asking him to recognize Scottish independence from England. The signatories claimed to speak on behalf of the ‘entire community of the realm of Scotland’ (tota Communitas Regni Scocie). In the first epigraph I quoted, the signatories claim that their war hero Robert the Bruce, who had defeated the English at Bannockburn in 1314, was king only by their consent, and that if he ‘subverted’ their rights (sui nostrique Juris subuersorem), they would depose him.

Introduction

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In 1647, after the parliamentary armies had defeated King Charles I in the first English civil war, they argued among themselves about what that defeat implied. A faction of soldiers and civilians, known as the Levellers, put forward a programme (‘An Agreement of the People’) for limited government, universal male franchise, and frequent general elections. This horrified the leaders of the Parliamentary Army, but they nevertheless debated the proposals for two weeks with the Levellers, beginning in Putney church. The (now) best-known speech at Putney was made by Col. Thomas Rainborough. He was rescued from utter obscurity by the discovery of the transcript in 1890, followed after a further century by a prize-winning exhibition in Putney church and the accolade of TV serialization (The Devil’s Whore, 2008). Rainborough’s ideas were reinvented independently by John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government was published in 1690 after the abdication of King James II (of England) and VII (of Scotland). After the writing, but before the publication, of Locke’s Second Treatise, Convention Parliaments1 in both countries had separately chosen William of Orange and his wife Mary to be king and queen. An elected monarchy, as perhaps foreseen by the Scots in 1320, was thus a reality. The parliaments rearranged the rules of royal succession again in 1701 (in England) and 1705–7 (in Scotland). That this history should have led for three centuries to the legal convention, and rule of common law, that Parliament, rather than the people, is sovereign is slightly mysterious. The Framers of the US Constitution, students of Locke and his successors in the Scottish Enlightenment, declared in 1787 ‘We the People of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution.’ They did not know about Rainborough, but some of them, including Thomas Jefferson,2 were close students of the English Civil War. Similar declarations have been made in numerous other democracies including France and Australia. This book explores how the British Constitution would look if its writers were to do what the American Framers did in 1787. The British Constitution is changing fast. The biggest generators of change were UK membership of the European Union (EU) in 1973; the first, and so far only, nationwide referendum, on whether Britain should remain in the EU,3 in 1975; and the devolution of power to elected governments in Scotland, Wales, and intermittently Northern Ireland, enacted in 1997–8 and beginning in 1999. Through all these changes, and others described in this book, some writers of textbooks on law and constitutional theory have clung to an outdated framework defined for them by a deeply prejudiced law professor with a long beard, whose most famous book was published in 1885. Even as they argue with him (as most of them do), they continue

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

to take his theories as their starting point. One problem is that he seemed to know very little about Scotland, although he coauthored a book about the Union of England and Scotland in 1707. That Union created Great Britain, a new state with a single Parliament and executive. The incoherence of the British Constitution is not a new problem. It dates back to that union of 1707, when two constitutional traditions were awkwardly merged. A symbol of this awkwardness has endured for three centuries with almost no comment. The Treaty and Acts of Union 1706/7 unite the executives and legislatures of England and Scotland into Great Britain. They comprise three documents in temporal sequence. In the first (the Treaty), English and Scots negotiators agreed a set of terms for union. In the second (the last Act of the Scottish Parliament), the Scots enacted the articles of the treaty, but announced in advance that their assent would be withdrawn if the English failed to accept the incorporated Act for the Security of the Church of Scotland. The English were welcome to add an Act of their own for the security of the Church of England. In the final document, namely the last Act of the English Parliament, the English did just that, while reciting and incorporating the Scottish Act. Whether this third document is viewed as the last act of the English Parliament or (as the various collections of Statutes do) the first Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, it imposes two conflicting duties on the monarch of Great Britain. The incorporated Scottish Act is an Act for securing the true Protestant religion and Presbyterian Church Government. Each incoming monarch must, by the Acts of Union, ‘inviolably maintain and preserve the foresaid Settlement of the true Protestant Religion’. The English Act requires that for ever hereafter every King or Queen succeeding and coming to the Royal Government of the Kingdom of Great Britain at His or Her Coronation shall in the presence of all persons who shall be attending assisting or otherwise then and there present take and subscribe an Oath to maintain and preserve inviolably the said Settlement of the Church of England and the Doctrine Worship Discipline and Government thereof as by Law established within the Kingdoms of England and Ireland the Dominion of Wales and Town of Berwick upon Tweed and the Territories thereunto belonging.

Because the English Parliament incorporated the Scottish Act as the Scots had forced it to do, these two incompatible requirements are found in a single Act of Parliament, the (English) Union with Scotland Act 1706 c.11.4 There can be at most one true Protestant religion. The monarch of the United Kingdom is legally required to protect inconsistent truths.

Introduction

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Despite that anomaly, the Union of England and Scotland was successful after a rocky start. It was bitterly unpopular in Scotland when it was negotiated, and its unpopularity enabled the Jacobites (supporters of the deposed King James VII and II—Jacobus in Latin—and his descendants the ‘Old Pretender’ and ‘Young Pretender’) to mount their unsuccessful risings in 1715 and 1745. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the ‘Young Pretender’ to loyalists, arrived in Edinburgh in 1745 and set up his court at Holyrood Palace (just across the road from the present-day Scottish Parliament). The Edinburgh militia of university intellectuals failed to resist him, and he soon defeated a government army at Prestonpans, east of Edinburgh. However, his invasion of England petered out at Derby, and his forces were routed on the retreat at Culloden, near Inverness, in 1746. Soon after Culloden, the Scottish Enlightenment of Adam Smith and David Hume burst forth in astonishing profusion. Scotland suddenly changed from the dirt-poor theocracy it had been only fifty years earlier, when an Edinburgh student was hanged for blasphemy, to a prosperous and cultured society, whose elites believed that the Union had been very good for Scotland. Nobody seriously challenged that view until the 1880s, and then only because nationalism started to seep back from Ireland. The Union of Great Britain with Ireland in 1800–1 looked superficially like the Union with Scotland of a century earlier. But there was one fatal difference. In both cases, the MPs and negotiators of the smaller country demanded conditions in return for their agreement to dissolve its parliament. In Scotland, those conditions were subsequently honoured (with an exception, described below, which lasted from 1712 to 1843 and caused a great deal of trouble but did not threaten the Union itself after 1746). In Ireland, they were not. Ireland was overwhelmingly Catholic; its second religion was the Presbyterianism of the Ulster Scots; the established Anglican religion was only the third in size. A faction of its all-Protestant Parliament had demanded greater civil rights for Catholics and Presbyterians as part of the Union bargain. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger had promised them. But after the Act of Union had passed and the Irish Parliament had dissolved itself, King George III decided that Catholic emancipation, as it was called, would violate his Coronation oath to protect the Protestant religion, and he vetoed it. Pitt resigned, and the Union was illegitimate from the start in the eyes of most Irish people. When they got the vote, they used it to elect politicians who demanded a weakening (but not a dissolution) of the Union. They were called ‘nationalists’. Their opponents were called ‘Unionists’. By the 1880s, Protestants from the north-east of Ireland tended to be fervent Unionists, but so did many English and Scottish people.

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

In spite of the Scottish and Irish difficulties, a traditional narrative of the British Constitution continued to develop, due principally to the nineteenthcentury jurist and Unionist ideologue A.V. Dicey (1835–1922), who was an Oxford law professor. After the Hanoverian succession, ‘the King’ became to a large extent ‘the government, acting in the king’s name’. The government inherited the Royal Prerogative from the king. Under the Royal Prerogative, which is part of the customary common law and is not codified, the government may do lots of things without seeking the consent of legislature or people. Here as elsewhere, English commentators have assumed without hesitation that legal doctrines derived from English history apply throughout Great Britain, although Scots law remained distinct under the terms of the Treaty and Acts of Union. Throughout his writings Dicey refers to ‘England’ and the ‘English Constitution’ to mean the United Kingdom and the British Constitution, respectively. His last book, however, written jointly with R. S. Rait, the Historiographer-Royal for Scotland, was a study of the 1707 Act of Union. Here Dicey and Rait (1920) acknowledge that Scotland might be different, although even in this book they refer only to a singular Act of Union. However, Dicey is most famous for his Introduction to the Law of the Constitution (Dicey 1885/1915), a text which went through eight editions in his lifetime and is still a reference point for constitutional law despite frequent attacks on it by public lawyers. He announced two fundamental doctrines: parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. These were intended to be both descriptions of the British Constitution and normative statements. In other words, they claimed to describe both how constitutional actors, such as judges and soldiers, actually behaved and how they ought to behave. But Dicey was also a fervent Unionist who hated the idea of devolution to Ireland. This hatred led him to undermine his own constitutional doctrine and to encourage others to do so. He was one of the main godfathers of the Unionist revolt of 1912–14, described later. A coalition including the king, the leaders of the Opposition, the House of Lords, and a group of contingently mutinous5 army officers vetoed the policies of the elected government. What happened in spring 1914 was no less than a successful coup d’e´tat. It would have made a civil war in Ireland almost inevitable had it not been providentially overtaken by the First World War. Dicey’s own actions helped to make his doctrine descriptively wrong. Parliament was not sovereign, nor did the rule of law apply, in 1914. Dicey and other Unionists groped for a rival doctrine of popular sovereignty, but did not produce a credible one. He also destroyed his own normative theory.

Introduction

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By 1913 he had reduced it to the proposition: ‘Parliament is sovereign except when I think it should not be: in which case those who think it should remain sovereign are fools.’ In his last and most strident blast against Irish Home Rule, A Fool’s Paradise (Dicey 1913), he writes that ‘oppression, and especially resistance to the will of the nation, might justify what was technically conspiracy or rebellion’. In Ireland, soldiers at the Curragh and gunrunners at Larne took him at his word in 1914. In the name of what they took (without evidence) to be the will of the nation, they destroyed parliamentary supremacy, as this book relates. Nevertheless, modern texts on constitutional law still operate in the shadow of Dicey (but see Weill 2003). Despite a formidable onslaught from (Sir) Ivor Jennings in the 1930s, standard texts would say until recently, ‘Dicey’s word has in some respects become the only written constitution we have’ (Jowell and Oliver 1985, second edition 1989: p. v). Vernon Bogdanor, quoting this, sets about ‘exorcising Dicey’s ghost’ in his copious writings about the UK Constitution (Bogdanor 1995, 1996, 2003). He fails to. Although Jowell and Oliver now refer to ‘hammer blows against our . . . Diceyan traditions’ delivered since 1997 (Jowell and Oliver 1985, fourth edition 2000: p. v), the undead Dicey still hovers over discussions of sovereignty and the rule of law. For instance, in the most important constitutional case to reach the Law Lords so far in the twenty-first century, one of the Law Lords giving judgment describes Dicey as ‘our greatest constitutional lawyer’.6 As a consequence, professional discussions of such matters as Crown prerogative, church establishment, the role of the UK monarchy in its constitution, devolution, Europe, and the status of fundamental constitutional law have a century-old conservative slant. This book aims to exorcize Dicey’s ghost. It is both political history and political science. The history aims to explain why Dicey’s legacy is bankrupt. By examining the creation of the United Kingdom in 1705–7 and 1800–1, I try to show how Dicey’s anglocentrism blinded him, and almost everybody who has followed him, to the real nature of the two unions. I then focus on the Unionist campaign of (initially civil) disobedience against the elected governments between 1909 and 1914, which began with the House of Lords’ rejection of government bills including the 1909 Budget and culminated in the illegal arming of Ulster Protestant paramilitaries with 30,000 rifles and three million ammunition rounds from a dealer in Hamburg. (The price was high because German arms dealers were also arming both sides in the Mexican civil war.) This operation was bankrolled by, among others, Rudyard Kipling, Lord Milner, and possibly the Unionist frontbencher

10

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

Walter Long. The most revered commander in the British Army, FieldMarshal Lord Roberts, approved a letter to be issued in his name encouraging soldiers to disobey orders.7 The coup was masterminded by Sir Edward Carson and encouraged by the Leader of his Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Andrew Bonar Law. Law probably had advance knowledge of, and may even have financed, the Hamburg-to-Larne gunrunning. His Majesty King George V was loyal to his opposition, not to his government. All of these believed that the Parliament Act 1911 had removed Parliament’s legitimacy. The reader may say that this was a long time ago, and that the possibilities for later coups have been modified by such developments as the abdication of Edward VIII and the Parliament Act 1949. But these events need only have happened once to destroy Dicey’s credibility, because they show that at times of heightened partisanship—exactly the times when a constitution must be most robust—the British Constitution was at its most fragile. To replace Diceyanism as positive description I introduce (in Chapter 2) veto-player theory and an American-derived theory of modified popular sovereignty. Briefly, the more veto players there are in a political system, the more stable its outcomes. Under the normal operations of parliamentary politics, there were only two veto players in British politics up to 1911, and something like 1.5 since then. The two veto players can be represented as the median MP and the median peer. Normally, with single-party governments, the median MP is a member of the governing party. The median peer was always a Conservative up to 1999 and is now a Liberal Democrat, a Lord Spiritual (i.e. bishop), or a cross-bencher. The median peer held a veto over all legislation (except, it was believed, money bills) up to 1909. In 1909, he vetoed the Budget. This led, after two general elections forced by successive kings’ veto on creating peers without an election, to the curbing of his powers in the Parliament Act 1911, limiting, but not eliminating, his veto. It is still effective in the last years of a Parliament, when time has run out to enforce legislation by repeated passage through the Commons under the terms of the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949. I then introduce the concept of the ‘win set’ of the status quo. The win set is the set of points that can be reached by majority decision without being vetoed. If the United Kingdom truly was the ‘elective dictatorship’ that politicians in opposition sometimes claim it to be, the win set would be of infinite size, because anything the median MP could be persuaded by her government to support would be carried. This would be majoritarian, but not stable, because after the next election the median MP might be of a different party. But the United Kingdom is not an elective dictatorship, except perhaps under Conservative governments before the United Kingdom’s entry to the

Introduction

11

EU. At all other times, the (Conservative till 1999) median peer is a veto player subject only to the Parliament Acts and the ‘Salisbury convention’ discussed later. Since EU entry, the primacy of EU over member-state law limits parliamentary sovereignty. This is brought out most starkly in the Factortame cases of 1990–1,8 which I analyse below. With more veto players, policy is more stable, but some outcomes that a majority of elected legislators would prefer cannot be reached. Since EU entry, two further challenges to parliamentary sovereignty have materialized. One is devolution within the United Kingdom, which brings back to the agenda a number of issues that Scots lawyers and historians (and almost nobody else) have worried about since 1707.9 The other is human rights law. These are discussed in detail in Chapters 9 and 10, respectively. If parliamentary sovereignty is incoherent, what might replace it? My answer is popular sovereignty modified by entrenchment. American constitutionalism reached this point over 200 years ago (and Australian constitutionalism over 100 years ago). The US Constitution, ratified in 1787–8, declares that ‘we, the people of the United States . . . do ordain this Constitution’. It is easy to be cynical. No women or slaves ordained it. Nevertheless, it was subject to ratification, and was ratified. The original Constitution therefore embodies the compromises necessary to get majorities of those entitled to vote in at least nine states to ratify it. It contains provision for its own ratification and amendment. It creates two directly elected chambers—the President and the House of Representatives. Since the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, the Senate has also been directly elected. As they are all elected by different procedures, the median voter in each is a different person, and the win set of the status quo is the set of policies that is not vetoed by the median (unique) President, the median Senator, or the median Representative. There is therefore a considerable amount of discussion of the US and Australian constitutions in this book. Why these two countries in particular, rather than (say) Canada, Germany, or France, which get only passing mentions? Because the United States and Australia are the only two countries with a common-law tradition whose original constitutions claim to derive from the people. (Canada was a latecomer to this party, but its 1982 constitution is discussed in Chapter 10). The US Constitution had to be ratified by constitutional conventions in at least nine states before coming into effect. It was, although some of the ratifying states demanded that a further Bill of Rights be added: it was, too. The Australian Constitution was the product of constitutional conventions in 1891 and 1897–8—the first elected by the colonial legislatures, and the second directly elected by the people. Neither Constitution may be amended unless the draft amendment is ratified by a supermajority of the people in a majority of the states.

12

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

The United States is a federal republic. So, according to Galligan (1995), is Australia. The former description is uncontroversial; the latter is controversial. Australians had a constitutional crisis in 1975, logically followed by a referendum on a republic in 1999, which the republicans lost. Nevertheless, I agree with Galligan that in all essentials Australia is both a federal and a republic. The starting point of this book is: ‘How would the British Constitution look if we all agreed (1) that the Acts of Union 1706/7 enacted a treaty, not a takeover; and (2) that sovereignty ultimately comes from the people, not Parliament?’ I argue that it would look like the constitution of a federal republic. The US Constitution also guarantees rights, both procedural (e.g. against self-incrimination) and substantive (e.g. of free speech), which are intended to be proof against majorities. To that extent it restricts popular sovereignty in favour of protecting rights. As explored in Chapter 2, it does not operate as it says on its face. Analysis of the US Constitution and inferences for the United Kingdom must deal with the uncomfortable fact that all the most important amendments to the Constitution have been enacted unconstitutionally. This book discusses what would change and what would not were the United Kingdom to become a regime of popular sovereignty modified by entrenchment. Laws to be entrenched would include those that create or amend a rule of recognition. A rule of recognition is a secondary rule or metarule that stipulates which claimants to the title of ‘rules’ may actually be called rules. As classically defined: [A] ‘rule of recognition’ . . . will specify some feature or features possession of which by a suggested rule is taken as a conclusive affirmative indication that it is a rule of the group to be supported by the social pressure it exerts . . . . In a developed legal system the rules of recognition . . . instead of identifying rules exclusively by reference to a text . . . do so by reference to some general characteristic possessed by the primary rules (Hart 1961).

Another class of rules about rules are ‘rules of change’ which give a defined set of people the right to introduce new primary rules and abolish old ones. The rule of recognition needs to recognize the rule of change (Hart 1961: pp. 92–3). Thus the Parliament Acts, Representation of the People Acts, and Parliamentary Constituencies Acts are rules of change. They each redefine the class of people entitled to make authoritative primary rules, and the class of people entitled to elect those who make those primary rules. So do those Acts that incorporate treaties between sovereign bodies, such as the Act of Union 1706

Introduction

13

and the European Communities Act 1972. The 1706 Act creates a Parliament of Great Britain; the 1972 Act gives EU law priority over domestic law. Rules of change must contain a rule for their own amendment. If a branch cannot bend, it may break. The US Constitution, wonderful achievement though it was, contained no rule saying whether, and if so in what circumstances, states could secede. This omission helped to cause the bloodiest war in US history. For the same reason, it would be wrong to insist that Scotland cannot secede from the United Kingdom, or that the United Kingdom may never leave the EU. It would not only be wrong, but also pointless. If a majority of both Members of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish people want Scotland to secede, there would be little or no resistance in the UK Parliament to repeal of the 1706 Act. Since the Scottish election of 2007, both the minority Scottish Nationalist government and the leader of the Opposition in Scotland have called for a referendum on Scottish independence (although they wanted different sorts of referendum, at different times). Parliament has already offered the same guarantee to Northern Ireland. If a majority of the people there wish to secede from the United Kingdom, nobody will stand in their way. It would be totally pointless for a UK government to say to the Scots that, since the constitution is a reserved power, a Scottish referendum vote in favour of independence was of no force.10 Nevertheless, Parliament and the courts already treat constitutional Acts like these two as special, in ways to be described in later chapters. It would be much clearer and simpler if the procedures for their repeal or amendment were explicitly supermajoritarian. All written constitutions include rules for their amendment. For instance, amendments to the US Constitution require a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and the assent of three-quarters of the states. Amendments to the Australian Constitution require an absolute majority of both houses of parliament and approval in a referendum. These are high thresholds; there have been few constitutional amendments in either country. If an Act or constitution cannot be repealed by a simple majority of those voting in each Parliamentary chamber, it is said to be entrenched. How entrenchment might work in the United Kingdom is discussed in later chapters. Many constitutions also entrench fundamental rights. It would be possible to entrench some rights protection in the United Kingdom, including, for instance, the Human Rights Act 1998. It would also be possible to go further. One entrenchable Act protecting fundamental rights could be drawn directly from the US Constitution by simply adapting its First

14

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

Amendment: ‘Parliament shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.’ Under such a regime, a number of bodies that remain only because of intellectual conservatism would disappear. These would include an unelected upper house, established churches, and the remaining constitutional duties of the monarch. The 2007 Green Paper on Governance in practice disestablishes the Church of England, although it denies doing so. The upper house of Parliament would be wholly or largely elected. After the Commons voted (perhaps cynically) for a wholly elected upper house in 2007, a cross-party Parliamentary committee with representatives from both houses (including a bishop) produced a White Paper in 2008 (Ministry of Justice 2008), analysing options and transitional arrangements for such a house. The immediate press response was cynical. But I think the White Paper is worth taking more seriously than the UK press did when it appeared. Dicey and others were scrambling around for a theory of popular sovereignty a century ago. But that theory must remain radically incoherent unless the people elect the veto players in the executive (who may be drawn from either house) and the legislature. All churches and faith communities would become voluntary bodies subject to the same regulation as all other charities. They would have no role in the legislature (whereas the 2008 White Paper proposes to retain bishops). The head of state would be either directly elected or chosen by both elected houses of Parliament. The titles ‘king’, queen’, prince’, ‘lord’, etc. could remain but neither duties nor privileges would be attached to them. Constitutional law is a secret garden. Some lawyers object to people who are not lawyers setting foot in it. One lawyer told my publishers that the prospectus for this book was the worst proposal he or she had ever seen. I think this is unfortunate. It has meant that lawyers’ discussion of the British Constitution has been locked away in the secret garden. But it matters to everybody. That is why I have barged in. Equally, as one trained originally in history and later in political science, I have not hesitated to barge into the secret gardens of other academic disciplines. Historians may find this book annoying for a different reason. I have not recounted the long sweep of British and Irish constitutional history, but have rather zoomed in on a few key moments. I concede that I may have wrenched my moments out of context. But with a tight word limit it was that or nothing. I want my political science to be historically informed. My reference list is therefore a list of the works referred to in the book. It is not a list of everything I have read on British history or the British Constitution. Some may raise an eyebrow at my scanty citation of (especially)

Introduction

15

law texts. The reason is that I find that they go on an infinite regress. What is the British Constitution? What a previous constitutional lawyer has said it is. Some people who are not constitutional lawyers are allowed into the canon, including a mid-Victorian journalist, and a king’s secretary writing to The Times under the pseudonym ‘Senex’ (old man). As related below, in late 1975, when the Australian Attorney-General’s office urgently had to compile a file on whether the Governor-General of Australia could properly dismiss the Prime Minister of Australia (which he just had), they were reduced to photocopying a mutually referring cycle of mostly British constitutional law books. Most of them said he could. One of them (Sir Ivor Jennings) said he perhaps could but certainly should not. This is pretty intellectually unsatisfying. One lawyer whose approach is quite similar to mine, namely Elizabeth Wicks (2006), is scantily cited for a different reason—I did not become aware of her book until I had written about two-thirds of this one. Like me, Wicks analyses certain critical junctures of UK constitutional history, although (except for her important chapter on the European Convention on Human Rights) she does not use archive sources. Her list of crucial junctures is similar but not identical to mine. The main difference is that, like other lawyers and historians, she seems to underestimate the (counter-)revolutionary events of 1911–14, which I analyse in detail. For different reasons, I cite only scantily some other modern UK lawyers and political scientists whose approach is closer to mine, although I do not exactly agree with any of them. They include Adam Tomkins, Anthony King, David Marquand, and Richard Bellamy (Tomkins 2005, 2008; Bellamy 2007; King 2007; Marquand 2008a, 2008b). I have deliberately not kept their books beside me whilst writing mine: not because I do not respect them, but because I want to say what I want to say, rather than produce a more conventional literature review. I am limited in time and words. Some topics for which I have no room are admirably covered in the recent review by the Constitution Unit, University College, London (Hazell 2008b). This book reviews Hazell’s earlier constitutional History of the Next Ten Years (1999) which mostly proved prophetic. I say little about proportional representation and almost nothing about either watchdogs of the constitution or freedom of information (although I have used FOI to prise open some of the sources I use). Although I talk about upper house reform, I have no room for a discussion of lower house reform. For admirable and even-handed discussions of all of these, see Hazell (2008b). If people outside the magic circle were allowed to nominate their most important constitutional document (other than an Act of Parliament), my

16

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

vote would go to an exchange of letters between Prime Minister Asquith and King George V in autumn 1913 on the constitutional position of the sovereign. The issues they contest are at the heart of the book. I believe that, on all the main points, Asquith was right and the king was wrong. But that is for the reader to judge. Although four of the five have been published before, to the best of my knowledge, they have never been published as a set; and Asquith’s final salvo has not been published before as far as I know. I struggled to find the right place to put them in the book. In the end, I have put them as an appendix to Chapter 12. But I refer to them constantly in the book. And they are such a good read that perhaps the reader should go there first, and then decide whether or not to read the rest of this book.

1 The English Public Lawyers’ Constitution A SO - C A L L E D ‘ U N W R I T T E N ’ C O N S T I T U T IO N Here is the full text of the letter published in The Times on 2 May 1950, which I mentioned in the Preface and Introduction.

D IS S O LU T I O N O F PA RL IA M E N T

Factors in Crown’s choice Sir,—It is surely indisputable (and common sense) that a Prime Minister may ask—not demand—that his Sovereign will grant him a dissolution of Parliament; and that the Sovereign, if he so chooses, may refuse to grant this request. The problem of such a choice is entirely personal to the Sovereign, though he is, of course, free to seek informal advice from anybody whom he thinks fit to consult. In so far as this matter can be publicly discussed, it can be properly assumed that no wise Sovereign—that is, one who has at heart the true interest of the country, the constitution, and the Monarchy—would deny a dissolution to his Prime Minister unless he were satisfied that: (1) the existing Parliament was still vital, viable, and capable of doing its job; (2) a General Election would be detrimental to the national economy; (3) he could rely on finding another Prime Minister who could carry on his Government, for a reasonable period, with a working majority in the House of Commons. When Sir Patrick Duncan refused a dissolution to his Prime Minister in South Africa in 1939, all these conditions were satisfied: when Lord Byng did the same in Canada in 1926, they appeared to be, but in the event the third proved illusory. I am &c., April 29.1

SENEX.

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

What should a discourse analyst, such as a constitutional lawyer, make of this? On the face of it, we do not know who wrote the letter, with what authority. The writer states that there are matters about the Sovereign’s response to a Prime Minister’s request for a dissolution that cannot be publicly discussed. Two things are said to be both indisputable and common sense, though in a brief letter the author does not have space to explain why. A wise sovereign is defined as one who jointly possesses three listed qualities, implying that any other sovereign is unwise. For a sovereign to be wise, it is therefore essential that he or his advisors is capable of judging whether a general election would be detrimental to the national economy. He or his advisors must therefore have skills in macroeconomic analysis. Whether a Prime Minister may or may not expect a request for dissolution of Parliament to be granted is clearly a bedrock constitutional matter. A denial of such a dissolution means that the head of state, rather than the electorate, has chosen the government. So how can a constitutional lawyer—or anybody else—know that in this respect the UK Constitution is what Senex says it is? Bogdanor (1995: 158) states that ‘Senex’ was Sir Alan Lascelles, King George VI’s principal private secretary, who at the time was 63. He does not state how he knows this, but quotes letters from Lascelles in the Royal Archives on cognate matters which make the claim plausible. What, then, made Sir Alan an authority on the Constitution? Rather circularly, the fact that he had been a courtier since 1920. In his earlier career, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, he had had difficulty in settling into a job. Having failed to get into the Foreign Office he turned his hand to journalism and stockbroking but found them dispiriting. He joined the Bedfordshire yeomanry in 1913 and was mobilized on the outbreak of war. (Prochaska 2004)

He, thus, had no formal qualifications except his long service to three kings, one of whom (Edward VIII) he evidently despised. His dispiriting experience in stockbroking may or may not have qualified him to judge whether a general election would be detrimental to the national economy. It is to uncertainties such as these that writers refer when they inaccurately call the United Kingdom’s constitution ‘unwritten’. Rather, a mutually referring group of writers say that constitutional conventions are what they say they are. The canon of these writers is generally held (see, e.g., King 2007: 15) to include:  Walter Bagehot, political commentator, economist, and journalist (1826–1877);  A. V. Dicey, jurist (1835–1922);

The English Public Lawyers’ Constitution    

19

Sidney Low, journalist, historian, and essayist (1857–1932); L. S. Amery, politician and journalist (1873–1955); Harold Laski, political theorist and university teacher (1893–1950); and Ivor Jennings, jurist (1903–1965).

The descriptions of each writer are taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). They reveal that to be a canonical writer on the British constitution it is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a constitutional (‘public’) lawyer, or, as ODNB puts it, a ‘jurist’. Nevertheless, in the rest of this chapter I attempt to give a consensus view of what English public lawyers (and the journalists, politicians, and royal secretaries who are deemed canonical) say constitutes the British Constitution. They say that there are two fundamental principles: parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law.

PA RLIAMENTARY S OV EREIGNTY As often, the starting point is Dicey (1885/1915: 30, 37–8): The duty, in short, of an English professor of law is to state what are the laws which form part of the constitution, to arrange them in their order, to explain their meaning, and to exhibit where possible their logical connection. . . .The sovereignty of Parliament is (from a legal point of view) the dominant characteristic of our political institutions. . . .Parliament means, in the mouth of a lawyer (though the word has often a different sense in ordinary conversation), the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons; these three bodies acting together may be aptly described as the ‘King in Parliament’, and constitute Parliament. The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.

In ‘stat[ing] what are the laws which form . . . the constitution’, Dicey relied on earlier writers. He cites the eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780), first as to the composition of Parliament: THE constituent parts of a parliament are the next objects of our enquiry. And these are, the king’s majesty, sitting there in his royal political capacity, and the three estates of the realm; the lords spiritual, the lords temporal, (who sit, together with the king, in one house) and the commons, who sit

20

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? by themselves in another. And the king and these three estates, together, form the great corporation or body politic of the kingdom, of which the king is said to be caput, principium, et finis. For upon their coming together the king meets them, either in person or by representation; without which there can be no beginning of a parliament; and he also has alone the power of dissolving them. (Blackstone 1765–9: I, 149)2

Blackstone (and Dicey, following him) locates parliamentary sovereignty in fifteenth-century decisions by judges that they have no power to inquire into the internal affairs of parliament. Dicey quotes a long passage from Blackstone to this effect. In turn Blackstone quotes the early seventeenthcentury jurist Sir Edward Coke and others of that century, on the sovereignty of parliament. This reflects the common pattern (and problem) of constitutional lawyers’ citations of one another: How many iterations of a constitutional lawyer’s citation of a predecessor’s claim that X does it require for X to be true? It is also interesting that Dicey’s citation of Blackstone stops just before Blackstone goes on to write: IT must be owned that Mr Locke,3 and other theoretical writers, have held, that ‘there remains still inherent in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them: for when such trust is abused; it is thereby forfeited, and devolves to those who gave it.’ But however just this conclusion may be in theory, we cannot adopt it, nor argue from it, under any dispensation of government at present actually existing. For this devolution of power, to the people at large, includes in it a dissolution of the whole form of government established by that people, reduces all the members of their original state of equality, and by annihilating the sovereign power repeals all positive laws whatsoever before enacted. No human laws will therefore suppose a case, which at once must destroy all law, and compel men to build afresh upon a new foundation; nor will they make provision for so desperate an event, as must render all legal provisions ineffectual. So long therefore as the English constitution lasts, we may venture to affirm, that the power of parliament is absolute and without control. (Blackstone 1765–9: I, 157)4

This is a very significant omission on both Blackstone’s and Dicey’s part. Locke argued that sovereignty lay with the people, who could reclaim it from a tyrannical government. He held that that was exactly what happened in 1688, when the people deposed James II and accepted William and Mary. This idea of popular sovereignty profoundly influenced the framers of the American and Australian Constitutions. However, Blackstone’s rejection of Locke combines with his formalism that only a king can summon a

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21

parliament to leave him with an awkward question: What was the status of the ‘convention parliaments’ of 1660 and 1688, both of which met to invite somebody to accept the throne of England? Blackstone has no coherent answer to that question. We might now say that a revolution begets its own legality, and that this is what the English Bill of Rights Act and Scottish Claim of Right Act, both of 1689, do. They both announce that William and Mary have accepted their thrones on conditions laid down by the two convention parliaments. But then Blackstone’s invocation of ‘the king’s majesty, sitting there in his royal political capacity’ sits awkwardly with his claim, a mere eight pages on, that Parliament is sovereign because the courts have held back from interfering with it. What if there is a row between the king and the rest of parliament? Is that not what the English Civil War (1640–9) was about? Dicey resolves any such tension by saying that since 1688 ‘the King occupies his throne under a parliamentary title; his claim to reign depends upon and is the result of a statute’, namely, the Act of Settlement 1701, which itself recites the Bill of Rights Act 1689 (Dicey 1885/1915: 41). Neither Blackstone nor Dicey mentions the situation in Scotland (see later). In other books (especially Dicey 1905 and the anti-Home Rule polemics analysed in Chapter 6) and in other times Dicey was willing to admit that Parliament was in turn influenced, and partly elected, by the people. But here he claims to be stating ‘what the laws are’ as if that were an entirely separate exercise. In this, most English public lawyers have followed him. Even when they disagree with him (as most now do), they argue within an intellectual framework that he largely created. If I can persuade readers that that framework is fundamentally broken, a radical reconstruction may be possible. But that is a task for later chapters. Parliamentary sovereignty thus means that Parliament may enact anything it chooses. There is nothing it cannot do except, paradoxically, bind a later Parliament. For if an Act should contain a section such as That the foresaid true Protestant Religion, contained in the above-mentioned Confession of Faith, with the Form and Purity of Worship presently in use within this Church, and its Presbyterian Church Government and Discipline (that is to say) the Government of the Church by Kirk Sessions, Presbyteries, Provincial Synods, and General Assemblies, all established by the foresaid Acts of Parliament, pursuant to the Claim of Right, shall remain and continue unalterable, and that the said Presbyterian Government shall be the only Government of the Church within the Kingdom of Scotland. (Act of Union 1706, s.2)

22

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

what is the force of ‘shall remain and continue unalterable’? If Parliament is to be sovereign, a later Parliament, or even a later session of the current Parliament, must have the right to change its mind. The Parliament of 1711, after a Tory General Election victory, changed the ‘unalterable’ government of the Church of Scotland in a way which some of its supporters regarded as clear breach of the Treaty and Acts of Union. To Dicey and his followers, this merely reflects parliamentary sovereignty: It did it because it could. Furthermore, according to Dicey and his followers, repeal need not be explicit. In another of his more notorious phrases: Should the Dentists Act, 1878, unfortunately contradict the terms of the Act of Union, the Act of Union would be pro tanto repealed (Dicey 1885/1915: 141)

This is the doctrine of implied repeal. A later statute trumps an earlier one, even if the later statute does not explicitly repeal the section of the previous statute with which it is found to be inconsistent. What is it that Parliament is sovereign over? One formula is as given in the Government of Ireland Act 1920 at s.75: Notwithstanding the establishment of the Parliaments, of Southern and Northern Ireland, or the Parliament of Ireland, or anything contained in this Act, the supreme authority of the Parliament of the United Kingdom shall remain unaffected and undiminished over all persons, matters, and things in Ireland and every part thereof.

Here the political scientist and the lawyer tend to part company. The political scientist may say: But that is ridiculous. The whole point of the 1920 Act was to set up subordinate parliaments in Ireland. Of these, one (in Northern Ireland) succeeded and the other failed. The very enactment of the Act arguably made s.75 false. If its enactment did not, then certainly the treaty recognizing the independence of the Irish Free State in December 1921 did so. The Parliament of the United Kingdom no longer had supreme authority over persons, matters, and things in Ireland. The same comments apply to all divestments of power by the UK Parliament, including the statutes giving self-government to Canada and Australia. Warming to the theme, the political scientist may continue: The Australian Constitution is a schedule to the UK Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900. The UK Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, insisted on adding, to the constitution agreed by the Australian Constitutional Conventions, a section broadening the acceptable classes of appeals from the Australian High Court to the Privy Council. This forms part of s.74 of the Constitution: Except as provided in this section, this Constitution shall not impair any right which the Queen may be pleased to exercise by virtue of Her Royal prerogative to grant special leave of appeal from the High Court to Her

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Majesty in Council. The Parliament may make laws limiting the matters in which such leave may be asked, but proposed laws containing any such limitation shall be reserved by the Governor-General for Her Majesty’s pleasure.

At this point a historian may take over. The Australian Constitution was drafted at two constitutional conventions the second of which was directly elected, approved by the requisite popular majorities in five of the six states (not western Australia) and presented to the UK government as a fait accompli—or so the Australians hoped. However, Chamberlain insisted on broadening appeals to the Privy Council ‘because the interests of the British Empire—really of British interests in Australia—were concerned’ (Galligan 1995: 28). During the constitutional crisis of 1975 occasioned by Governor General Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of the government of Gough Whitlam, discussed below, Whitlam and his supporters appealed to Queen Elizabeth and her advisors to become involved. They refused, stating: The Australian Constitution (written by Australians, and which can only be changed by Australians) gives to the Governor-General (who is appointed by The Queen on the advice of her Australian Prime Minister) certain very specific constitutional functions and responsibilities. The written constitution, and accepted constitutional conventions, preclude The Queen from intervening personally in those functions once the Governor-General has been appointed. . . . (From standard letter by Queen’s assistant private secretary to those who wrote to her to complain about the dismissal, November 1975, in Whitlam 1979: 176–7)

However, the Queen’s assistant secretary, although an Australian himself, was not quite right. Section 74 of the Australian Constitution was not wholly written by Australians. It was changed, and then enacted, by non-Australians. Did the extension of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) matter? Yes and no. Private law cases continued to be referred to the JCPC (presumably at huge expense to litigants) until shortly before the abolition of appeals to it in 1986. Public law cases did not. The High Court of Australia has only ever referred one case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and then only because the Court was deadlocked. One other early public law case had gone on appeal to the Privy Council from a decision of the Supreme Court of Victoria.5 The JCPC argued that it had jurisdiction to hear the case, and issued a ruling—which the Australian courts simply refused to accept. In the words of a later Chief Justice of the High Court:

24

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? In Webb v. Outtrim, which was the first case affecting the Commonwealth Constitution which came before the Privy Council, it was apparent that the tribunal was not aware of the distinction between a unitary legislature with unlimited power [i.e., the UK Parliament as interpreted by Dicey] and a legislature operating under a federal Constitution by which it was bound [i.e. the Parliament of Victoria] . . . [T]he High Court considered Webb v. Outtrim and refused to be bound by the decision. The High Court pointed out some obvious slips in the reasoning of Webb v. Outtrim. (Latham 1952: 7, 26)

By the (UK) Australia Act 1986, Parliament forwent any jurisdiction over the Commonwealth and States of Australia, and appeals to the Privy Council were abolished. Parallel legislation was passed by the Commonwealth and State Parliaments in Australia (Galligan 1995: 31). Section 74 of the Australian Constitution has not been repealed or amended—it is simply made redundant by the Australia Acts 1986, passed simultaneously, and in identical terms, by the United Kingdom, Australian Commonwealth, and Australian State Parliaments. The results of appeals to the Privy Council, imposed on the Australians by Joseph Chamberlain, were simply ignored by the Australian courts long before 1986, whenever their reasoning conflicted with Australian constitutional understanding. We have the testimony of Sir John Latham, a long-serving Chief Justice of the Australian High Court, for that. Thus, already we note some difficulties with the Diceyan concept of parliamentary sovereignty: What happens if the components of the King-in-Parliament disagree with one another?  Most acutely, what happens if a king purports to dismiss (the rest of) a Parliament, or (the rest of) a Parliament purports to dismiss a king?6  How does the concept of parliamentary sovereignty sit with the anonymous assertion of ‘Senex’ in 1950 that the king may refuse dissolution of Parliament? Can a sovereign Parliament ever bind itself not to reclaim an authority it has devolved?  Specifically, can a sovereign Parliament meaningfully grant devolution to Scotland or (Northern) Ireland, or independence to Canada or Australia?  Can a sovereign Parliament make meaningful promises not to intervene in the internal affairs of civil society organizations such as churches? These difficulties will loom large in the chapters that follow.

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T H E RU L E O F L AW For Dicey, the rule of law has three components: We mean, in the first place, that no man is punishable or can be lawfully made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary legal manner before the ordinary Courts of the land. In this sense the rule of law is contrasted with every system of government based on the exercise by persons in authority of wide, arbitrary, or discretionary powers of constraint. We mean in the second place, when we speak of the ‘rule of law’ as a characteristic of our country, not only that with us no man is above the law, but (what is a different thing) that here every man, whatever be his rank or condition, is subject to the ordinary law of the realm and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals. There remains yet a third and a different sense in which the ‘rule of law’ or the predominance of the legal spirit may be described as a special attribute of English institutions. We may say that the constitution is pervaded by the rule of law on the ground that the general principles of the constitution (as for example the right to personal liberty, or the right of public meeting) are with us the result of judicial decisions determining the rights of private persons in particular cases brought before the Courts; whereas under many foreign constitutions the security (such as it is) given to the rights of individuals results, or appears to result, from the general principles of the constitution. (Dicey 1885/1915 quoted at 183–4, 189, 191)

Dicey glosses each of these three senses. As to the first, he asserts that the rule of law in this sense is confined to ‘England [sic], or to those countries which, like the United States of America, have inherited English traditions’—that is, to the common-law countries of the British Empire, past and contemporary. ‘[A] study of European politics now and again reminds English readers that wherever there is discretion there is room for arbitrariness.’ Dicey was a sworn enemy of continental droit administratif, which, he said, gave state officials unacceptable discretion to act as they pleased. As to the second, the law binds ‘every official, from the Prime Minister down to a constable or a collector of taxes’ just as it binds every non-official. Dicey does not clarify whether the law binds the monarch or not. He introduces his chapter with an untranslated statement from Norman-French law of the time of Henry VI (reigned 1422–61 and 1470–1): ‘by the law he himself and all his subjects are ruled’ (Dicey 1885/1915: 180; my translation). As to the third, he summarizes: ‘Our constitution, in short, is a judge-made

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

constitution, and it bears on its face all the features, good and bad, of judgemade law’. Subsequent lawyers, working within the Diceyan tradition, have tried to separate wheat from chaff in these statements. They have accepted for a long time that Dicey’s characterization of droit administratif owes more to prejudice than to actual knowledge of Continental legal systems (Robson 1928; Jowell 2007: 7). The issues of rules versus discretion, and courts versus administrative tribunals, are considered in the next section. Is the King-in-Parliament subject to the rule of law? This question introduces an apparent contradiction between Dicey’s two principles. To answer yes seems to limit parliamentary sovereignty; to answer no seems to limit the rule of law. The law of Henry VI could be read as stating ‘by the law the Kingin-Parliament and all his subjects are ruled’: but the King-in-Parliament could change it. The US Constitution states: No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed (US Constitution Article 1:9; article 1:10 bans the states from passing ‘ex post facto’ laws). An ‘ex post facto’ law is one that makes unlawful something that was lawful at the time it was done. Nevertheless, the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty seems to imply that Parliament may pass an ex post facto law. The War Crimes Act 1991 is the only Act of the UK Parliament where a Conservative government had to use the Parliament Acts 1911–49 to override a veto in the Lords. The Lords’ first veto was based on the claim that the bill was ‘retrospective legislation’ (HL Deb 04 June 1990 vol 519 cc1080–1208 quoted at 1086). Some commentators, such as Richard Bellamy, have disputed that there is any conflict between the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty. ‘The rule of law simply is the democratic rule of persons’ (Bellamy 2007: 83). In the case of the War Crimes Act, the Lords were unelected; the Commons were elected; the Commons’ use of the Parliament Acts can therefore be justified on democratic grounds. But suppose that an elected upper house had refused to pass the bill on the same grounds, claiming (as the unelected Lords did in 1990) that the bill violated the rule of law? Then there is a stark conflict between Dicey’s two principles; one has to give way. One possible way out of this dilemma is ruled out by Dicey’s third gloss on the ‘rule of law’, where he contrasts it with the rule of entrenched bills of rights. Dicey relies instead on ‘judicial decisions determining the rights of private persons’ to protect human rights. This has to follow from his defence of parliamentary sovereignty. If a UK Parliament enacted the US Constitution’s ban on ex post facto laws, it would be (purporting to) bind its successor, which, Dicey insists, is the one thing Parliament cannot do. Human rights, in his view, must therefore depend on judges, not on Parliament.

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Critics from within English public law The rule of law (in Dicey’s stipulative definition) came under challenge before parliamentary sovereignty did. The first challenge came from the behaviour of A. V. Dicey and a number of others, when they encouraged a number of illegal acts in Protestant Ulster in 1913–14. This is discussed below. In the calmer halls of the court and lecture room, Dicey’s characterization of administrative discretion as what those foreigners do was successfully challenged in 1928. The climate of public law in the United Kingdom changed with the politics of the day. In the 1930s, Jennings forcefully pointed out that there is much ideology in Dicey’s definition: when Dicey wrote his text, ‘the Whig section of the Liberal party, to which Dicey belonged, was still fighting what appeared to be a successful defensive action’ on behalf of minimal government and against regulation. ‘Dicey . . . was stating as a principle of the British Constitution what he, and many others of his generation, thought ought to be a principle of policy’ (Jennings 1933/1959: 307–8; stress in original). Already in 1885, Jennings points out, some classes of officials had extensive discretionary powers under the poor law or public health legislation. Such powers continued to expand in Dicey’s lifetime, notably with the National Insurance scheme introduced in 1911, and during and after the First World War. Appeals against the actions of officials were (and still are) heard in various administrative tribunals, but, as Jennings (1933/1959: 313) pointed out, ‘administrative courts are as “ordinary” as the civil courts’. Jennings’s work remained a standard reference through the Second World War and into the 1960s. In the climate of those times, politicians and writers generally regarded the Welfare State, with its proliferation of administrative discretion, as largely or wholly benign, and the occasional writer who warned of the ‘new despotism’ or similar dire threats, was a throwback to the mid-Victorian era. The spirit of the times was summed up by the Labour intellectual Douglas Jay, a minister in the Attlee and Wilson governments who had written in 1937, ‘in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves’ (Jay 1937: 317). In recent decades, there has been a swing back towards Dicey, in the first of his three arguments for the ‘rule of law’. As Jowell (2007) notes, this has been driven from the left as well as the right. For instance, benefit claimants and their advocates have succeeded in restricting the discretion of officials in deciding whether to allow claims. The courts have become more active, from a position in Jennings’s day where they were most unwilling to interfere in governments’ or officials’ discretion. This is in part driven by a huge jump

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

in applications for judicial review of decisions: but that is endogenous with the courts’ greater willingness to side with complainants. Are liberties better protected by judges or by a constitution? Inevitably, the answer may depend on what sort of judges there are. If courts typically side with one class of litigants against another (for instance, government officials against private citizens or, as classically claimed by Griffith [1977], the socially and morally conventional against the socially and morally unconventional), then Dicey’s argument may be turned against him. One of the benefits of the rule of law, he insists, is its certainty. Well then, should not civil rights, especially for unpopular groups, be entrenched in some law such as the US Bill of Rights, which Dicey deplored?

A fast-moving situation This book will argue that Diceyanism was fatally undermined a long time ago, by Dicey himself as much as others (Chapters 4–7). However, even readers who do not accept that argument will probably accept, as do all the constitutional law texts, that the United Kingdom’s Constitution is rapidly changing. The main drivers of change have been accession to the European Union (Chapter 8); devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Chapter 9); and developments in human rights law since the United Kingdom ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (Chapter 10). In the next chapter I introduce some concepts from political science that may help us understand what is going on in the politics of constitutions. I also make a first attempt, following through US history, to see how a constitution based (at least purportedly) on the sovereignty of the people, rather than the sovereignty of Parliament, has evolved.

2 A Fresh Start: Veto Players, Win Sets, and Constitutional Moments V ETO PLAY E RS AN D WI N S ETS George Tsebelis (1995, 2002) has introduced the important analytical concept of ‘veto players’ to political science. It is highly relevant to the themes of this book. Veto players are, as the name suggests, individuals or groups who have the power to block a proposal. According to Tsebelis, they come in two varieties: institutional and partisan. An institutional veto player is one who has the legal power to block. Such a player may be an individual (the US President) or a chamber (the House of Lords). And the veto may be unconditional (the US President’s at the end of a session of Congress, when there is no time to override it; the House of Lords on all non-monetary matters before 1911). Or it may be conditional (the US President when his veto may be overridden; the House of Lords since 1911, when it remains a veto player in the last year of a parliament, and over bills to prolong the life of a parliament, but not otherwise). A partisan veto player is a party (or other) group that may block a proposal so long as the group coheres. A governing party with over half of the seats in a chamber is a unique partisan veto player over all proposals that are carried if a simple majority votes for them. More than one party may be a veto player in a chamber where no party holds half the seats, or where more than a simple majority of those present is required to pass a measure. Now consider the status quo—the set of policies and constitutional arrangements currently in force. The status quo is stable if it is relatively hard to upset. The more veto players there are in a political system, or the larger the qualified majority required for a proposal to pass, the more stable is the status quo. Equivalently, as either the number of veto players or the qualified majority threshold rises, the win set of the status quo diminishes, and the core, or the uncovered set of the game, gets bigger. The win set means the set

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

of alternative policies that could be carried against the status quo. The core means the area of policy which, once reached, cannot be abandoned. Stability, thus understood, is neither good nor bad in itself. Most of us probably want the constitution to be stable and ordinary laws dividing spoils among interest groups to be unstable. An example of an unstable constitution would be that of Weimar Germany, after Hitler with a little help from his friends had drastically reduced the number of veto players to one. We would like the constitution to be protected by some sort of entrenchment, that is, a requirement for more than a simple parliamentary majority before it can be amended. The UK Constitution comprises, among other things, ordinary Acts of Parliament which, if the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty remains intact, are no more protected from repeal, explicit or implied, than is the Dentists Act 1878. These parts are thus not entrenched, nor do they require a supermajority for their amendment. The conventions of the British Constitution were set out, for instance, in a book written by a weekly magazine journalist in 1865, and an anonymous letter from a king’s secretary to The Times in 1950. It is hard to see what would count as a repeal of those documents. Certainly it does not seem to require a supermajority. In these respects, it may be felt that the British Constitution is insufficiently stable. An example of an over-stable distributive law might be the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (EU), which is wealth-destroying, economically crazy, and vicious to the developing world (among a number of its properties), but which is protected by the multiple vetoes and high qualified-majority thresholds of the EU. Policy in multiple-veto-player regimes is more stable than in single- or small-n veto player regimes. The EU obviously has multiple veto players. So do individual member states, in the EU and elsewhere, which have proportional representation. Proportional representation goes along with multiparty government. Each coalition partner in a multiparty government is a veto player because each can threaten to leave the coalition and bring down the government. Seen in this light, the veto-player framework is an extension of Duverger’s famous Law: The simple-majority single-ballot system favours the twoparty system . . .[;] the simple-majority system with second ballot and proportional representation favour multi-partism (1954: 217, 239). Duverger’s Law comprises three propositions. The second, concerning the run-off system of election used for the French parliament, is generally held to be false. The first and the third are well-founded, when the conditions are carefully stated. The simple-majority single-ballot (i.e. ‘Westminster’ or ‘first-past-the-post’) system implies that there will be, in the long run, at most two viable parties in each constituency. As it becomes common knowledge which parties are not

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competitive in a given constituency, voters will withdraw support for them and vote for whichever of the two locally dominant parties they dislike less. Duverger’s Law may be read as a statement of a special case of the veto-player framework. A multiparty system may be reclassified as a system with numerous partisan veto players. From this you can read off the greater stability (for both good and ill) of policy under proportional than under majoritarian electoral systems. The UK is classically hailed as the ideal type of Duvergerian two-party system. As W.S. Gilbert wrote a long time ago: Then let’s rejoice with loud fa-la (Fa la la la, fa, la la la) That nature always does contrive (Fa la la la la) That every boy and every gal That’s born into the world alive Is either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative. (Gilbert 1882, opening of Act 2)

The UK was a two-party system because of Duverger’s Law. But note that the Law, properly construed, states that only at most two parties are competitive in each district. A party may be competitive (or even dominant) in some districts while not competitive (or even present) in others. The Irish Party was dominant in most of Ireland from 1885 to 1918 inclusive. It also won one seat in Liverpool throughout that period. Otherwise, it had no presence in Britain at all. Nevertheless, it was pivotal, and hence a partisan veto player, in four parliaments, namely those elected in 1885, 1892, and twice in 1910. We will hear a lot more about the Irish Party. But where there are no significant regional parties, the winning party’s lead in seats is typically much greater than its lead in votes. This has long been known as the ‘cube law’, because the ratio of seats going to the top two parties has sometimes been as high as the cube of their ratio of votes. (In 1906, it was even higher; in modern conditions it is lower, but there is still an exaggerative effect.) Two pairs of political economists have proposed extensions to this Duverger–Tsebelis framework. From their extensive and sophisticated crossnational statistical analysis, Persson and Tabellini (2005: 270) find that One of the central findings of this book is the strong constitutional effect of electoral rules on fiscal policy . . . [A] switch from proportional to majoritarian elections reduces overall government spending by almost 5% of GDP, welfare spending by 2–3% of GDP, and budget deficits by about 2% of GDP. Advocates in the United Kingdom of the opposite switch, from majoritarian to proportional, should take careful note of these findings.

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The intuition behind this result is as follows. A majoritarian government, as normally in the UK, is dominated by a single party. There is a large win set of the status quo. The governing party can switch from current policy to anything it can persuade its followers in the House of Commons to support. This will make it relatively good at enacting important but (in the short term) unattractive proposals, such as either expenditure reductions or tax increases needed to balance the budget. In contrast, a proportional government contains numerous partisan veto players. Each of them represents a narrower segment of society than in a majoritarian regime. Each of them demands spending (including transfers) for the benefit of the group of citizens that it represents. So: more welfare spending, but less budget discipline. Iversen and Soskice (2006) explore why some democracies redistribute more than others. In the 1990s, the United States used redistributive taxation and transfers to reduce the pre-tax-and-transfer poverty rate by 13 per cent; Sweden reduced it, on the same measure, by 82 per cent. Both are democracies. What is the relevant difference? According to Iversen and Soskice, the main relevant differences lie in the electoral system and the structure of veto players. For a country like the UK these have opposite effects. The electoral system (as shown independently by Persson and Tabellini) implies that majoritarian countries like the UK more often than not have right-wing governments hostile to redistribution, compared to countries with proportional representation. There is a tricky question of direction of causation here, which is not relevant to the main theme of this book. What is highly relevant is Iversen and Soskice’s finding (page 175 and Table 5) on the effect of the number of veto points. ‘[M]ultiple veto points, as expected, reduce redistribution, and . . . PR has a direct (positive) effect on redistribution.’ The UK has few veto points and no PR. The first effect increases redistribution, and the second reduces it, with ambiguous overall results. But what if we transfer this framework to the study of the constitution? We might suppose that left-wing governments support constitutional reform, while right-wing governments oppose it. This is too simple—once a leftwing government has seized the levers of power in the UK, the normal absence of veto players means that it has more opportunity than elsewhere to enact its redistributive programme. This might be a fair description of the Liberal governments of 1908–14 and the Labour governments of 1945–51. Labour in its most redistributive period was indeed hostile to constitutional reform. The Liberals in theirs, on the other hand, were strongly in favour. What was the difference between the cases? Essentially, as is argued in detail in the following chapters, the number of veto players in the UK temporarily but sharply increased between 1909 and 1914 to include the House of

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Lords, the kings, and sections of the army. The Liberals’ substantive programme—redistribution—became impossible without their procedural programme—constitutional reform. Thus important redistributive moments may or may not coincide with important constitutional moments. The constitutional moments for the UK examined in this book are those of 1707 and 1909–14. They are not the only constitutional moments in British history. The diffuse seventeenth-century revolutions were undoubtedly constitutional. But in one sense, 1707 was their culmination so their omission is more apparent than real. This book does not explicitly discuss the stages in the widening of the franchise, where 1832 was the most important constitutional moment. It will be mentioned in passing in this book, because in 1832 as in 1911 the unelected parts of the British parliament gave way to the elected part, under the threat of the mass creation of peers and hence of the substantial reshaping of the unelected part. But, as 1707 in a sense summarizes the seventeenth-century constitutional revolutions in England and in Scotland, so 1912–14 summarizes 1832. The unelected houses were brought face to face with the consequences of majority rule in the elected house. The next section therefore discusses constitutional moments in another common-law Anglophone democracy: the United States.

CONSTITUTIONAL MOMENTS The tradition of parliamentary sovereignty has traditionally not distinguished constitutional statutes from normal legislation.1 As the UK unquestionably has constitutional statutes, which (in practice) courts now treat differently to ordinary statutes, parliamentary sovereignty has become an obstacle, not a key, to understanding the UK’s Constitution. We need a new key. The place to look for such a key is in the constitutional practice of other countries. For the purposes of this book, the most appropriate comparator countries are those which, in all respects except their constitutions, are the most similar to the UK. This means looking at the other major common-law democracies: the United States, Canada, and Australia. Is this not a blinkered selection of comparators? No: the common-law background, and the common constitutional starting point, of all four countries are vital. Before 1707, England had one of the most developed codes of common law, a phrase with multiple overlapping meanings: law

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

common to the whole country; and/or law for (disputes among) commoners, to which the king was not party. But a feature of it, in all its meanings, was that it was judge-made law, not law made by Parliament in statutes, nor in comprehensive codes (which apply in civil law jurisdictions). In all four common-law democracies, judges determine what the law is unless and until it is changed by a trumping statute. The UK, the United States, and Canada are not pure common-law jurisdictions. Scotland, Louisiana, and Quebec offer partial exceptions. The civil-law codes of Louisiana and Quebec, both former French colonies, are not relevant to the themes of this book. But the code of Scotland assuredly is. Scots could not, or chose not to, study at Oxford or Cambridge. Intellectual interchange was with the universities of the Netherlands, France, and Italy, not England. Scottish legal rules were therefore codified independently of England’s, most notably in James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair’s Institutions of the law of Scotland, deduced from its originals, and collated with the civil, canon and feudal laws; and with the customs of neighbouring nations (Dalrymple 1681). Stair’s subtitle indicates that Scotland was not wholly either a common-law or a civil jurisdiction; and it had no explicit doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty before 1707. To this day, the main annotated compilation of Scots law is called the Stair Memorial Encyclopaedia. Nevertheless, the United States (in 1787), the Commonwealth of Australia (1900), and Canada (as late as 1982)2 each introduced a written constitution as a third tier of law, above judge-made, English-derived common law and statute law. As this book argues for a similar step in the United Kingdom, it is worth examining how some of those jurisdictions distinguish between constitutional law and ordinary law. At a formal level it is easy. The US Constitution comprises the original Constitution drafted in 1787 and ratified by all the states then existing, plus its subsequent amendments, of which the first ten (the Bill of Rights) were ratified soon after the original ratification, being regarded in some states as further guarantees that must be promised before those states’ conventions would sign up to the original constitution. The Constitution may be amended by the procedure (actually, by any one of the four procedures) set down in Article 5: The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the

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Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress.

The Constitution of Australia, likewise, comprises the text agreed by two conventions of the Australian states at the turn of the twentieth century. It may only be amended by the procedure of Chapter VIII: 128. This Constitution shall not be altered except in the following manner: The proposed law for the alteration thereof must be passed by an absolute majority of each House of the Parliament, and not less than two nor more than six months after its passage through both Houses the proposed law shall be submitted in each State and Territory to the electors qualified to vote for the election of members of the House of Representatives. [paragraph dealing with differences between the Houses omitted] When a proposed law is submitted to the electors the vote shall be taken in such manner as the Parliament prescribes. [sentence about arrangements for States without universal suffrage omitted] And if in a majority of the States a majority of the electors voting approve the proposed law, and if a majority of all the electors voting also approve the proposed law, it shall be presented to the Governor-General for the Queen’s assent.

Constitutions may include unamendable sections. In the original US Constitution, the article permitting the slave trade to continue until 1808 was made unamendable. Now, under Article 5, the only unamendable provision is that ‘no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate’. In the Australian Constitution, nothing is absolutely unamendable, but: No alteration diminishing the proportionate representation of any State in either House of the Parliament, or the minimum number of representatives of a State in the House of Representative, or increasing, diminishing, or otherwise altering the limits of the State, or in any manner affecting the provisions of the Constitution in relation thereto, shall become law unless the majority of the electors voting in that State approve the proposed law.

By comparison, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany makes the following matters unamendable: 79 (3) Amendments to this Basic Law affecting the division of the Federation into La¨nder, their participation on principle in the legislative process, or the principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20 shall be inadmissible.

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Article 1 (1) states, ‘Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.’ Article 20 states: (1) The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social federal state. (2) All state authority is derived from the people. It shall be exercised by the people through elections and other votes and through specific legislative, executive, and judicial bodies. (3) The legislature shall be bound by the constitutional order, the executive and the judiciary by law and justice. (4) All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order, if no other remedy is available. These constitutions set high thresholds for amendment. There have been only twenty-seven amendments to the US Constitution to date; ten of these comprise the Bill of Rights, passed in 1791. There have been only eight successful amendments to the Australian Constitution to date, out of forty-four proposals. A formalist statement would therefore run: The higher law of the United States (Australia, Canada, Germany . . . ) is the Constitution as validly amended to date; the ordinary law is everything else, which in common law systems may be divided into statutes and common law. But this is too simple. In a powerful two-volume (so far) critique, Bruce Ackerman (1991, 1998) develops what he calls a model of ‘dualist democracy’. He takes on various enemies, including those who privilege the ‘plain meaning’ of the US Constitution (‘hypertextualists’), and those who seek to examine the ‘original intent’ of its framers. But the organizing argument is that ‘dualist democracy’ sits between two untenable alternatives, which he calls ‘monism’ and ‘rights foundationalism’. Monism is the belief that Democracy requires the grant of plenary lawmaking authority to the winners of the last general election—so long, at least, as the election was conducted under free and fair ground rules and the winners don’t try to prevent the next scheduled round of electoral challenges. (Ackerman 1991: 8)

As he goes on to explain, this formulation is ‘an idealized version of British Parliamentary practice’, which has been upheld by distinguished American thinkers as varied as Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the monist view, as characterized by Ackerman, the anti-democratic movements in American history notably include the period early in F. D. Roosevelt’s New Deal when the ‘Nine Old Men’ of the Supreme Court overturned legislation

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emanating from the administration that held the largest presidential and congressional majority in US history. At the other extreme, ‘rights foundationalists’ believe that ‘the American constitution is concerned, first and foremost, with the protection of [rights]. Indeed, the whole point of having rights is to trump decisions rendered by democratic institutions that may otherwise legislate for the collective welfare . . . Rights trump democracy—provided, of course, that they’re the Right rights’ (Ackerman 1991: 11–12). Rights foundationalism, argues Ackerman, may correctly describe the ideology of the German Basic Law, with its list of unamendable rights provisions, but is just an incorrect description of the US Constitution. An amendment, duly passed under Article 5 procedures, that repealed the First Amendment in favour of a statement that Christianity was the official religion of the United States would be valid law—just as (though Ackerman does not here appeal to this case) Prohibition was valid higher law in the United States from the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 until its repeal by the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933. A rights foundationalist would be horrified by the repeal of the First Amendment, as Ackerman would, but would be unable to argue that the Twenty-eighth Amendment establishing Christianity as the official religion of the United States and imposing disabilities on practitioners of other religions was invalid law. How then should we parse the US Constitution? For this argument the three crucial parts are the Article 5 amendment procedure, the ratification rule (Article 7), and the very first sentence of the Constitution: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (US Constitution, preamble)

What does this mean? One level of the history of the preamble is its textual history. The working draft of the Constitution presented by the Committee of Detail to the plenary convention in Philadelphia, on 6 August 1787, opened ‘We the people of the States of [the list of the original 13 states3 follows] do ordain, declare, and establish the following Constitution for the Government of ourselves and our Posterity.’ Towards the end of the convention, the text was referred to a Committee on Stile and Arrangement, which presented the text we know today to the Convention on 12 September 1787. The Convention accepted it (Madison 1787/1987: 385–96, 616–34). The members of the Committee on Stile and Arrangement were Alexander Hamilton, William Johnson, Rufus King, James Madison, and Gouverneur Morris. They thus included two of the three authors of The Federalist Papers

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(Hamilton and Madison) and the most talkative rhetorician of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who is thought to have been the author of the Preamble. ‘Rhetoric is concerned with the persuasion-value of sentences’ (Riker 1986: x). Like every other delegate, Morris knew that the Convention and the country were divided. He was a genius at crafting persuasive sentences. The original draft of the preamble was cumbersome, and contained an obvious untruth—namely the claim that the people of Rhode Island had ordained, declared, or established anything. The final version claimed that the people of the United States, no less, had ordained the Constitution. This, too, was an untruth, but one that, as it turned out, was cloaked in such lofty language that it inspired eleven of the thirteen original states to ratify the Constitution by the procedure it laid down. (Rhode Island ratified, grudgingly and conditionally, in 1790; North Carolina rejected in 1788, and ratified in 1790.) Morris was also responsible for some theatre at the end of the convention, as reported by Madison. Benjamin Franklin, the oldest delegate, wrote (and had delivered by another delegate) a witty rallying speech to the effect that they all thought the constitution had flaws but that they should nevertheless ratify. Franklin then moved that the Constitution be signed by the members and offered the following as a convenient form viz. “Done in Convention by the unanimous consent of the States present the 17th of Sept. &c—In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names”. This ambiguous form had been drawn up by Mr. G[ouverneur]. M[orris]. in order to gain the dissenting members, and put into the hands of Docr Franklin that it might have the better chance of success (Madison 1787/ 1987: 654)

The trick worked. Three weighty members present (George Mason and Edmund Randolph, both of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts) refused to sign. Four other opponents of the evolving constitution—one of them the weighty but loquacious Luther Martin of Maryland—had left during the convention as its shape gradually emerged (Rakove 1999). The State of New York was left with only one delegate (Hamilton) as his two Anti-Federalist colleagues had gone home. Nevertheless, the unanimous consent of the States present was gained, attested by the signature of the lone Hamilton from New York, and three delegates from Virginia including Madison, compared to five from tiny Delaware. Article 7 of the original constitution stipulates that ‘The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.’ As noted, eleven of

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the twelve states represented at Philadelphia did so, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. When the ninth state (New Hampshire) ratified on 21 June, 1788, the Constitution was valid. Or was it? There are two objections to this formalist (as lawyers call it, ‘blackletter’) interpretation. First: on 21 June, 1788, two of the most important states, New York and Virginia, had not yet ratified. They were both in doubt until the last minute. Both had been divided at the Convention (New York throughout, and Virginia when Mason’s and Randolph’s objections crystallized late on), and were deeply divided in the state. The finest rhetorical efforts of Hamilton and Madison had gone into The Federalist designed to persuade the New York ratifying convention to say Yes. After writing thirty-odd numbers of The Federalist, but finishing only three-fourths of the way through the series, at number 63, Madison had to hurry back to Virginia in the hope of getting his home state to ratify, something about which he had been deeply pessimistic. The Constitution was remarkably improbable. The rhetoric of Morris, Madison, and Hamilton, and a few others, saved the day for it (Riker 1996). But if Virginia and New York had not both ratified, the United States would not have come into being regardless of the formal satisfaction of Article 7. Secondly, and more startlingly, Ackerman argues that Article 7 was itself unconstitutional. The Constitution in force in 1787 was the Articles of Confederation, a document that reflected the loose alliance that the states had formed to fight the war of independence. The Philadelphia Convention was itself of dubious legitimacy, as it exceeded the instructions under which it had been called. But the rules for amending the Articles of Convention were perfectly clear: All thirteen of the treaty partners must ratify any change in the Articles. Rhode Island, governed at the time by a radically democratic assembly, was deeply suspicious of closer union and would have vetoed any alteration to the Articles. Most of the political leaders in several other states were Anti-Federalists. Does this mean that the language of We the People is totally empty? Have we been hoodwinked by Gouverneur Morris for two centuries? No, says Ackerman (1991, 1998); and I largely agree with him.4 Constitutional moments, he argues, are marked not by unanimity but by a supermajority. The supermajority must be reflected in the institutions of the day. It is not necessarily the supermajority specified in Article 5 of the Constitution. The two most important constitutional moments after 1787 did not go correctly through the Article 5 procedure. The Reconstruction (Thirteenth and Fourteenth) Amendments were, on a textualist view, unconstitutional. The New Deal avoided constitutional amendments altogether. Because this is a book about UK, not US, constitutional history, I have too little space to present these startling claims except in the baldest outline.

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Take Reconstruction first. One of the critical silences of the original Constitution was whether States had the right to secede from the union (Compare the British Acts of Union of 1707 and 1800, both of which declare that the union they inaugurate is perpetual. One of those unions has lasted; the other has not.) It also contained concessions and fudges designed to ensure that both free and slave states could join the Union. Slaves are referred to three times, although never under that name. The first time is in the article apportioning seats among the states in the House of Representatives. For the purpose of calculating states’ qualifying population (and hence entitlement to House seats), each slave was to count as three-fifths of a person. Secondly, the slave trade was to be allowed to continue at least until 1808, and this provision was made unamendable until then. This article was the subject of an explicit log-roll in the Convention between New England and the Deep South. Gouverneur Morris (again!) arranged the log-roll (‘These things may form a bargain among the Northern and Southern States’—Madison 1787/ 1987: 507; Riker 1986: 89–105). The Deep South got protection of the slave trade; New England got the threat of a federal veto on their navigation acts lifted. Finally, the ‘fugitive slave’ clause (Article 4 Section 2 clause 3), forbade states to which fugitive slaves had escaped from abrogating their owners’ claims over them. The fugitive slave clause was agreed nem. con. at the Constitutional Convention (Madison 1787/1987: 552). The main protection that the Constitution offered to the South, however, came to be none of these three provisions. It was the rule which offered each State, regardless of population, two Senators. At the outset, the slave states held roughly half the seats in the Senate. After a threat in 1819 to unbalance this, the Missouri Compromise accepted the admission of Missouri as a slave state on condition that it was balanced by the admission of Maine as a free state. This aspect of the compromise lasted until 1850, with states being admitted in pairs, one slave, one free. Its breakdown when California was admitted as a free state was one of the things that led the slide into civil war. The American Civil War was a constitutional moment in its own right. The Union victory ensured that all the constitutional compromises just listed must be swept away, together with the institution of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment (ratified in 1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth (ratified, or as Ackerman would have it ‘ratified’ in 1868) specified that everyone born or naturalized in the United States was a citizen of the United States and of his or her state. It also, inter alia, applied the ‘due process’ clause of the Fifth Amendment to the states. Here is the puzzle: how many states were in the Union in 1865 and in 1868? Article 5 requires three-quarters of the states to ratify, either through their legislatures or via state conventions as Congress may specify. Immediately

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after the end of the Civil War, the Union Army arranged for state conventions to meet in each of the ex-Confederate states. These conventions altered the state constitutions to abolish slavery and created the first new state legislatures. Enough of these legislatures ratified the Thirteenth Amendment for the Secretary of State to announce in December 1865 that it had been ratified by three-quarters (twenty-seven out of thirty-six) states. However, when he made that announcement, the radical Republicans who controlled Congress had already refused to seat the Congressional delegations from all the Southern States except Tennessee (home of President Andrew Johnson). It was this rump Congress which proposed what became the Fourteenth Amendment to the states in 1866, thus (apparently) initiating the Article 5 process for the Fourteenth Amendment. But if there were thirty-six states in 1865, were there not still thirty-six states in 1866? If the southern delegations had been seated, historians agree that Congress would never have got the two-third majorities in each house required to initiate the Article 5 amendment process. President Johnson had come to the White House because of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had chosen him as Vice-President in 1864 in order to balance his ticket. Johnson was the only Senator from any southern state not to have joined the Confederacy. Accordingly, he was content to see the Thirteenth Amendment enacted. But he balked at the Fourteenth. The radical Republican Congress of 1866 sent the draft text to all the states, telling the southern states that their readmission to the union was contingent on their prior agreement to ratify the amendment. Article 5 assuredly gave it no power to make readmission contingent on ratification. The conflict became so acute that the House of Representatives impeached President Johnson on the ground that he had ‘affirm[ed] in substance that the 39th Congress of the United States was not a Congress of the United States authorized to exercise legislative power under the same; but, on the contrary, was a Congress of only part of the States’ (quoted in Ackerman 1998: 179).5 Johnson had a point. But he retreated from his attempt to block the Fourteenth Amendment. In the summer of 1868 he started behaving in a more conciliatory way towards Congress and the army. The impeachment failed in the Senate by a single vote. What then makes the Fourteenth Amendment a valid part of the US Constitution, and therefore part of the entrenched higher law of the United States? Assuredly not the text of Article 5 and the proclamation of its ratification by the radical Congress of 1867–9. It is not clear what norms apply in the constitutional chaos of civil war. Ackerman (1998: 244–5) sees the final constitutional moment of Reconstruction in the Supreme Court judgement in the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873. In these cases, the plaintiffs, white butchers from Louisiana, argued that their state government had violated

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the Fourteenth Amendment by imposing restrictive trading conditions on them. The Court dismissed their case, saying that the Amendment, one of three articles ‘of vast importance [which] have been added by the voice of the people’ (Mr Justice Samuel Miller quoted by Ackerman 1998: 245) is about the rights of blacks, not of whites. Interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment have moved on; but the idea that it represents ‘the voice of the people’ has stayed. This despite its very dubious Article 5 history. Hardly anybody now doubts the constitutionality of the Fourteenth Amendment, but its legislative history is very dodgy indeed. Ackerman claims that it is the voice of the people, not Article 5, that is crucial. The voice of the people was heard in the elections of 1864 and (particularly) 1866. The latter election gave the radical Republicans such a supermajority in the truncated Congress that Johnson—and the Supreme Court—had to retreat. The New Deal constitutional moment came without amending the Constitution. Soon after F. D. Roosevelt’s first election in 1932, he proposed a National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) which was quickly enacted. It envisaged a corporatist restructuring of industry, with massive federal intervention. In 1935, in Schechter Poultry Corporation v. US, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled it unconstitutional under the Fifth and Tenth Amendments. Known to generations of students as the ‘sick chicken’ case, Schechter concerned a wholesale kosher butcher in New York that had been convicted of several violations of the Live Poultry Code, including one of supplying unfit meat. The court held that the federal government had no authority to enact, still less to delegate the enactment of, such a code, dismissing arguments that the Schechters were engaged in interstate commerce and therefore subject to federal regulation. Roosevelt immediately denounced the Court decision as the worst since Dred Scott.6 Spinning to the newspapers, White House staff hinted that the President was contemplating a constitutional amendment, to be ratified by the state convention route (as the abolition of Prohibition, in the Twenty-first Amendment, had just been). But Roosevelt did not confront the Court head-on. First, he got Congress to enact the measures of the Second New Deal, which avoided the features of the NIRA ruled unconstitutional in Schechter. Then, he proposed to appoint one new Justice for every serving Justice over the age of 70, up to a total of six. Roosevelt’s ‘court-packing’ plan was widely denounced but effective. In what (again) all students have learnt to call ‘the switch in time that saved nine’, two swing members of the Court started to support the constitutionality of New Deal economic regulation, validating the Wagner Labor Act, the imposition of consumer standards on food products (e.g. in Carolene Products, discussed extensively in the following text), and the (state) regulation of labour hours for women and minors. The Court’s interpretation of the regulatory

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powers of Congress changed, and has stayed changed, so that the Interstate Commerce clause is held to give the federal government wide powers to regulate economic activity. No extra Justices were appointed. Roosevelt avoided seeking a formal Constitutional amendment because, in his words, ‘there was no way of keeping such an affair from getting out of hand what with Coughlin7 and other crackpots about. But there is more than one way of killing a cat’ (quoted by Ackerman 1998: 317). In reaching for his court-packing plan instead, Roosevelt and his aides had in mind the parallel with the British constitutional moments of 1832 and 1909–11 (the latter discussed in Chapters 4–7), on both of which occasions a ‘Lords-packing plan’ removed the House of Lords’ veto over constitutional reform. Roosevelt’s secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, noted in his diary for 27 December 1935 that FDR had a good deal to say about what the Supreme Court is likely to do on New Deal legislation. As once before in talking to me, he went back to the period when Gladstone was Prime Minister of Great Britain and succeeded in passing the Irish Home Rule Bill through the House of Commons on two or three occasions, only to have it vetoed by the House of Lords. Later, when Lloyd George’s social security act was similarly blocked, Lloyd George went to the King, who was in favour of the bill, and he asked Lloyd George whether he wanted him to create three hundred new peers. Lloyd George said that he did not but that he was going to pass through Commons a bill providing that in the future any bill vetoed by the House of Lords should, notwithstanding that, become the law of Great Britain if passed again by the Commons. He told the King that when that bill was ready to go to the Lords he would like the King to send word that if it didn’t pass, he would create three hundred new Lords. This the King did, with the result that the bill was accepted by the House of Lords. (Ickes 1953: 494–5)

What is of primary interest is not Roosevelt’s faulty knowledge of British history (interesting, though, that he attributes Asquith’s actions to Lloyd George) but his profound understanding of veto plays. He sensed that Lloyd George and Asquith were ultimately using the People to veto the Peers. What the US constitutional moments of 1865–8 and 1935–7 have in common, according to Ackerman, is that We the People spoke. The election sequences 1864–6–8 and 1932–4–6 each showed that a movement for radical constitutional reform had repeated popular support. President Johnson’s opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment crumbled after the 1866 election. The Supreme Court’s opposition to the New Deal crumbled after the 1936 election, which gave the Democrats their greatest majority in US history in the Presidency and both houses of Congress.

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How much of this analysis can be applied to the UK? Quite a lot. Historians are uneasy with Ackerman’s compression of complex history into brief ‘switch-in-time’ moments. They may be equally irritated at my parallel treatment. I claim boldly that the switch-in-time moments in British constitutional history are 1689–90, 1832, 1911, and 1914. On each of these occasions a body that can plausibly be described as the People overcame the veto of a non-elected player. In 1689, in separate revolutions in England and in Scotland, parliamentarians speaking in the name of the people deposed a line of monarchs and invited a new one. In 1707, although I cannot claim that union was made by the people, I do claim that the Union crisis was brought about by further parliamentary efforts to determine the royal succession. When these threatened to drive England and Scotland apart, the treaty partners brought them together on improved terms for Scotland. In 1832 and (as noted by FDR) 1911, the People were ultimately the force that overcame the Lords’ vetoes over constitutional reform. The date 1914 may seem the strangest on my list. As I go on to record in this book, the People (in the shape of the twice re-elected House of Commons majority) were thwarted by the Lords, the King, the Ulster Unionists, and part of the Army. In the longer term, however, the episode showed that Asquith was right and George V wrong in their interpretations. The Sovereign must act, as Asquith insisted, always and only on the advice of Ministers commanding a Commons, and ultimately a popular, majority. Anything else made the Sovereign a partisan. George V and his advisers did not realize that then, but events in Australia in 1975 proved that Asquith had been right. Perhaps to the dismay of historians, I therefore find the concept of ‘constitutional moments’ very useful. One could say that the British Constitution is like a series of train crashes. Since 1840, railway accidents in the UK have been investigated by HM Inspectorate of Railways. W. E. Gladstone, arguably the greatest administrative reformer in British history, was one of those who shaped the system (McLean and Foster 1992). Most inspectors’ reports into accidents recommend safety improvements to prevent a repetition of the accident. In railway safety, the equivalent of the Parliament Act 1911 is the Regulation of Railways Act 1889, which demanded continuous brakes on trains after a terrible accident at Armagh, when a Sunday School train parked on a hill had run away backwards into a following locomotive and dozens of children were killed. The rule book of British railways is the consolidation of nearly two centuries of accident reports. It may be helpful to regard the rule book of British politics—the constitution—in the same way. Each constitutional moment, such as 1707 and 1911, then represents a rule change necessitated by some constitutional accident or disaster.

Part II The Constitution from Below

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3 1707 and 1800: a Treaty (Mostly) Honoured and a Treaty Broken Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan

The motives will be, Trade with most, Hanover with some, ease and security with others, together with a generall aversion to civill discords, intollerable poverty and . . . constant oppression. (Earl of Roxburgh,1 a member of the Squadrone Volante [‘Flying Squadron’ of swing voters in the last Scottish Parliament] in 1706: Whatley 1989: 153).

This chapter aims to show that the Union of England and Scotland in 1707 was a genuine treaty, conducted by two bargainers of unequal power; however, the weaker partner (Scotland) had enough to force the English to the table and to extract some concessions from them. In contrast, the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800–1 was not a genuine treaty, because one party unilaterally abrogated it after it had been concluded and after the Irish Parliament had ceased to exist. To make these points requires historical analysis in considerable depth. Readers who are happy to take our claims on trust may skip this chapter and fast-forward to 1909, when the detailed historical analysis resumes. For Dicey and Rait (1920), the Union of Scotland with England and Wales of 1707 was an act of supreme statesmanship, cementing the political and geographical basis from which the British Empire could be consolidated. For Scottish nationalists it was a betrayal: ‘We’re bought and sold for English gold—Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!’2 Namierite historians share the Scottish nationalist analysis without the poetry. Sir Lewis Namier powerfully influenced a generation of British political historians with his ideology that there was no ideology in eighteenth-century parliaments, only interests (Namier and Brooke 1964). The leading Namierite writing about the Union, P. W. J. Riley (1968, 1978), took it as axiomatic that the Scottish Union negotiators, and those who voted for Union in the last Scottish Parliament, were a parcel of rogues. Other views stress the advantage of a union as a free-

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trade area, and the Scots’ need to recoup the losses from their disastrous Darien expedition, described later. None of these adequately recognizes that the Treaty of Union was a true treaty from which both sides gained, but both made concessions. Union did involve a strengthening and consolidation of the parliamentary sovereignty based at Westminster, but also entrenched the Scottish Presbyterian church, and established a unified trading, financial, and military system, which had advantages for the political establishments in both London and Edinburgh. In our monograph, State of the Union (McLean and McMillan 2005), we analysed, for the first time, the flow of votes in the last Scottish Parliament to show that none of the standard explanations of Union was correct. The Earl of Roxburgh was a better guide than Dicey, Namier, Riley, or Burns. The key issues were trading relations; the succession of the monarchy (a politicoreligious question); and the military situation. We repeat, more concisely, some of the analysis. Readers who wish more detail are referred to State of the Union. Darien had shown that Scotland could not build an independent empire. The venture involved two expeditions to Central America (modern Panama), which sought to establish a colony by opening up trade from the Far East, as well as the Americas. The first expedition sailed in July 1698, with some 1,200 colonists, but was devastated by illness, and failed to establish ‘New Edinburgh’. The settlement was abandoned in June 1699. A second expedition was dispatched before news of the failure of the first had reached Scotland, and encountered a Spanish military force which defeated the Scots. Darien was abandoned by the Scots in April 1700 (Barbour 1907; Insh 1932; Fry 2001: ch. 2; Devine 2003: ch. 2). King William III and Queen Mary were monarchs of both Scotland and England by parliamentary invitation—one from each parliament, therefore in principle on different terms. However, William’s geopolitical interests were primarily those of a king of England. England was at war with France. Therefore, on the chessboard principle that my enemy’s enemy, lying on my enemy’s opposite frontier, is my friend, Spain was an ally of England. The Scots invasion of territory in Darien claimed by Spain interfered with William’s statecraft. The English agent in Scotland, Daniel Defoe, saw trading issues—striking a balance between protectionism and free trade—as one of the keys to success. So have many modern commentators. A weakened Scottish economy would be strengthened by closer political links with the booming English trading society. The humiliation of Darien, which squandered Scottish capital and exposed the Crown’s promotion of English over Scottish interests, gave place to a united trading empire which the Scots were able to exploit.

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However, the negotiators of Union did not know Adam Smith’s or David Ricardo’s arguments for free trade, because they had not yet been written. The succession of the monarchy was a focus for the opponents of the Union in Scotland, who responded to the Act of Settlement passed in Westminster in 1701—asserting the Hanoverian succession across Britain—with their own Act of Security, which reserved the Scottish Parliament’s right to choose the monarch. This challenged the 1603 union of the Crowns under James VI and I. The battles of the seventeenth century, and the English settlement through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, had a different resonance in Scotland. The Scots acceptance of William had been associated with the establishment of the Presbyterian church, but the Glencoe massacre,3 the Darien collapse, and the obstinacy (seen from Edinburgh) of the London court had since undermined Scottish allegiance to the Crown. In the seventeenth century, Presbyterians and Catholics had attacked the Stuarts’ Anglican monarchy from opposite sides. Therefore, the Crown had to choose the lesser of two evils to be its Scottish ally. The association between the Crown and Scottish Presbyterian interests made their Jacobite4 enemies opponents of the Union. Some Jacobites were Catholics; others (especially strong around Aberdeen) were Episcopalians. ‘Such a parcel or rogues in a nation’ is a Jacobite ballad (real, or invented by Burns). On the other wing, hardline (‘Covenanting’) Presbyterians yearned for a return to the theocratic 1640s and did not trust either William or Anne. The succession provides a cross-cutting cleavage in parliamentary politics which explains much of the failure of an alternative constitutional settlement, in both the Westminster and Edinburgh Parliaments. Roxburgh’s ‘ease and security’ relates to military discord. England was at war with France. In 1689–90, during the previous French war, the Jacobites had attacked the new English regime in both Scotland and Ireland, with French support. England needed to secure its north and west frontiers, with troops based in Northumberland and Ireland poised to march. Scottish troops were diffused amongst the different armies campaigning at the time, but the English knew that military conquest of Scotland was expensive and dubious. Cromwell had succeeded; but Edward I and Charles I had failed. Union offered a bulwark against a Jacobite invasion and military consolidation. The most articulate Scottish opponent of Union, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, sought a system of security based on local militias, rather than a united army that would be at the command of the monarch. But when Jacobite invasions did come in 1715 and 1745, unitary military command made them easier to contain than they would have been without Union (and the Edinburgh militia completely failed to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie).

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An incorporating Union would tie parliamentary limitation of the Crown to a more stable form of administrative finance. Therefore, the Westminster Parliament was willing to promote Union as a policy. But why was the Scottish legislature happy to forfeit notional independence for a role in Westminster? After the accession of King William, on the terms proposed by the Scottish Parliament, it became more assertive in its right to develop its own political programmes independent of Westminster. But whereas the necessities of financing military and trading operations had led the London government to widen the tax base and improve its yield, the Scottish government, with no wars of its own to fight, had been hindered by economic stagnation and administrative weakness. Darien was financed out of a stock issue, not from taxation. This meant that Scottish control over revenue and patronage was limited. Incorporating Union was one solution to this situation, but it was not the only one. However, the status quo seemed unviable to those who thought seriously about Scotland’s plight, such as the Union negotiator Clerk of Penicuik. Clerk denounced those who exclaim against the Union, as a thing that will ruin us; not considering that our case is such, that ’tis scarce conceivable, how any condition of life, we can fall into, can render us more Miserable and Poor, than we are (Whatley 2006: 291).

In addition, the pro-Union forces were centrists; the anti-Union forces a fissile alliance of religious extremists—extreme Presbyterians and Jacobites. Darien and Glencoe had undermined the faith that some had placed in the joint monarchy of King William. At the instance of lobbyists for English chartered companies, William had banned English subscriptions to the Company of Scotland, and imposed restrictions on Scottish shipping in a Navigation Act, in 1696 (Whatley 2006: 169). The Union case was argued by some of the most colourful characters of the period. Daniel Defoe was sent to Scotland as a pro-Union propagandist, and William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England and driving force behind the Darien venture, also campaigned for the Union. The anti-Union campaign in Edinburgh was led by Fletcher of Saltoun, renowned for both his political radicalism and violent temper, and fitfully by the Duke of Hamilton, renowned for his dominant mother and psychosomatic toothache. Whilst Fletcher developed a plan for the radical reworking of constitutional and governmental relations between London and Edinburgh (Fletcher 1698, 1703 in Robertson 1997), his views were not influential, except that Hamilton adopted his clever threat to name someone other than the elector of Hanover to succeed Anne in Scotland. A. V. Dicey saw the Union as the foundation of British military success, and an act of great statesmanship; its benefit shown by the failure of any move to

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repeal. For Dicey it was also a prime example of a conflict between a wise decision and a popular one: in England the measure received little general acclaim, and in Scotland it was greeted with widespread hostility. The Union stood, therefore, as a warning to the sensible and patriotic Englishman against a constitution which allowed the predominance of the popular over the wise (Dicey [1915] 1982: cxix). We shall see this anti-majoritarian theme in Dicey recurring in later chapters. Economic historians (e.g. Smout 1969: Chapter 9) view the Union as a stage in the Scottish assimilation into a wider Britain. They follow Clerk of Penicuik. Smout (1969: 217) argues that the Scottish Parliament was unable to free itself from the influence of the Crown and London. For Dicey, Rait, and Smout, the Union represented a sharing of sovereignty, entrenching a British national interest in a constitutional framework which promoted political stability, military strength, and economic development. More recent work on the passage of the Union has focused on the reasons for the Scottish acceptance of the measure. The last Scottish Parliament, which sat between 1703 and 1707, passed violently anti-English legislation at the start of its term and voted for Union at the end. At the start, relations between the parliaments in London and Edinburgh were set on collision course partly as a result of the slow arrival of the news of Marlborough’s great victory at Blenheim, in 1704. The English minister Godolphin advised Queen Anne to give her assent to the Scottish Act of Security in order to gain supply required to pay the army, which was late and seen as imperative in the light of the threat of a French invasion. Queen Anne assented to the Act on 5 August 1704, without knowing that three days earlier Marlborough had beaten the French army at Blenheim (Riley 1964: 7–8). Godolphin’s move created a game of beggar-my-neighbour between the two parliaments. Our roll-call analysis (presented in McLean and McMillan [2005]) tries to explain the Scottish Parliament’s swing to Union. There are no roll calls available for the English votes, but we also need to explain how the Act passed through Westminster with such serenity, when similar measures had previously attracted the objections of the trading interest and aroused ‘a maelstrom of prejudice in which the Scots were eclectically damned as beggars, thieves and murderers’ (Ferguson 1977: 102–3). The English placidly accepted union with a rival religion entrenched in Scotland: a religion which Charles I, Cromwell, Charles II, and James II had all tried to overthrow. The powers of the Scottish Parliament during the seventeenth century had waxed and waned inversely with those of the monarch. At the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the parliament had little power. James VI and I commented that ‘Here I sit and governe it [Scotland] with my pen, I write and it is done, and by a Clearke of the Councell I governe Scotland now, which others

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could not do by the sword’ (quoted in Rait 1901: 101–2). From 1641 to 1650 Scotland was ruled by the Scottish Parliament, in conjunction with the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. Cromwell’s victory over the Scots at Dunbar in 1650 saw a short-lived ‘union’, under which the Government of Scotland was neither ecclesiastical nor civil, but martial. The Edinburgh Parliament agreed to the Cromwellian union, ‘once again because it was ordered to do so’ (Rait 1901: 106). During this period, free trade with England was established, and feudality abolished. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the parliament was again reduced to subservience, and dominance of the king and the Episcopalian establishment reasserted. The feudal system of land tenure was restored, to be abolished by the Scottish Parliament in 2000. The Scottish Parliament’s acceptance of William and Mary in Scotland was formalized, through the Claim of Right Act 1689 and the Articles of Grievances, in a way which entrenched Scottish parliamentary authority (Mitchison 1983: 115–19). As in England, a pact between king and parliament extinguished the old claims of divine right. But it was a different pact. The Church of Scotland leader, William Carstares, promoted the establishment of the Scottish Convention Parliament, which met in Edinburgh in March 1689, and legitimized the accession of William to the Scottish throne (Dunlop 1967: 65–73). His influence over William eased the passage of the Act Ratifying the Confession of Faith and Settling Presbyterian Church Government on 7 June 1690. The General Assembly reaffirmed, in 1698, the independence of the Church from the state, declaring that ‘Jesus Christ is the only Head and King of his Church’ (Goldie 1996: 234). In return the powers of the parliament were strengthened by abolishing both the estate of the bishops and the Lords of the Articles, the parliamentary committee through which the crown’s executive authority had been exercised (Devine 2003: 50). From 1695 the Crown sought to control parliament through a system of ‘management’ by which patronage was directed through powerful aristocratic politicians. However, the coherence of the Scottish administration was undermined by factional competition between the supporters of the prominent aristocratic leaders. The initial confrontations with London were due to three issues which highlighted the subordination of Scottish to English politics. First, the Act of Settlement passed by the Westminster Parliament in 1701 purported to override Scottish authority over sovereignty and regal succession in Scotland. It stated that, in the absence of any natural heirs of Anne, the succession should pass to Sophia, Electress of Hanover (grand-daughter of James VI and I), and her issue. The measure was passed after Anne’s last surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, died in July 1700. Second, the delay in calling parliament

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in Edinburgh on the accession of Anne was seen as a challenge to Scottish parliamentary authority. Parliament was supposed to meet within twenty days of the king’s death, under the Act of Security of 1696. However, it was not recalled until ninety days after William’s death in March 1702, with the Duke of Queensberry (the royal manager in Scotland) and the court party reluctant to hold elections. The Duke of Hamilton therefore boycotted the 1702 session, which allowed the court party to press through key legislation, including measures designed to secure an incorporating Union (Ferguson 1977: 200–1). Thirdly, war was declared against France in May 1702 without consulting the Scottish Parliament, contravening the 1696 Act of Security (Brown 1992: 177). The Scottish Parliament responded with a hostile and assertive programme, which emphasized Scottish interests over the succession, trade, and military affairs. The parliamentary session of 1703 rallied against English domination, and sought an alternative to the subservience of Scottish politics to the interests of the London court. How then could the same parliament vote within four years for union and extinction? The Edinburgh Parliament was a unicameral body, with the three estates of nobles, barons, and burgh representatives voting together in Parliament House. In the 1690s, the parliament operated a system of committees, on which officers of state who were not members of the parliament could sit (but not vote). All of the key votes running up to the Act of Union were discussed by the full parliament. Votes were held with a clerk reading out the roll of members, and each member present giving his vote individually and aloud (Ditchfield et al. 1995: 140). Key votes were recorded in the Acts of the Parliament of Scotland (1966) alongside lists of voters drawn up by those present. This method of voting provides for a more accurate record of voting than for the Westminster Parliament, where voting was through leaving the chamber into a lobby. We, therefore, conducted a roll-call analysis of the vote in Scotland, though not in England.5 Three Acts passed in 1703 and 1704 seemed particularly anglophobic. The Act for the Security of the Kingdom (Act of Security) and The Act anent Peace and War asserted the right of the Scottish Parliament over the succession and declaration of war. These were part of Fletcher’s campaign to impose limitations on the influence of the English court on Scottish affairs. They were carried against the wishes of Scottish ministers. The third Act, the Act for Allowing the Importation of all Wines and Foreign Liquors (the Wine Act) was seen in London as part of the Scottish assertion of independence and anti-Englishness—opening up Scottish trade to French imports—but was actually an administrative proposal pressed by the Edinburgh court in an attempt to gain some much needed revenue. It was bitterly opposed by the

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

country party (including Fletcher6), which had pushed through the previous Acts. In fact, the records of votes against the Act of Security and the Wine Act show that only Sir Robert Dundas of Arniston voted against both, with 190 other MPs taking opposing sides. This allows us to construct a cross-section of the pro- and anti-court position in the Scottish Parliament in 1703. Those voting against the Act of Security and/or for the Wine Act are coded as ‘court party’; those voting against the Wine Act (a ministerial measure) and/or for the Act of Security are coded as ‘country party’. This can then be compared with the voting patterns on the Act of Union, which was passed by the same parliament in 1706, allowing an analysis of vote switching over the parliament. Although the two Acts may seem unrelated, or may even seem (to us) to be ideologically linked in the opposite way to the way contemporaries saw them, the fact that only a single MP voted against both shows a stark division along party lines. The 1704 and 1705 sessions of the Edinburgh Parliament were chaotic. Lord Queensberry’s administration fell in the aftermath of false claims of a Jacobite conspiracy (the ‘Scotch plot’ or ‘Queensberry plot’). In Edinburgh, the new Commissioner, Lord Tweeddale, struggled to press for a resolution of the question of the succession with little parliamentary support (the ‘New Party’, which never commanded more than thirty votes) (Ferguson 1977: 217), amidst Queensberry’s attempt to undermine his ministry and a continued agitation from the country party. The London court offered a deal, whereby in return for the Scottish Parliament’s acceptance of the Hanoverian succession the parliament would gain a veto over court appointments. This addressed Fletcher’s criticisms of the lack of parliamentary control over patronage. However, it did not go far enough, and instead the parliament passed a resolve, proposed by the Duke of Hamilton: ‘Not to name the Successor till we have a previous Treaty with England for regulating our Commerce, and other Concerns with that Nation.’ This resolve was cleverly worded: vague enough to unite those seeking to undermine Tweeddale, the Jacobites, and Fletcher’s desire for limitations on the monarchy and a strong parliament. In order to secure the supply necessary to support the military campaign in Europe, building up to Blenheim, Queen Anne was forced to concede the Act for Security, alongside an Act permitting the export of wool. Both these measures, although accepted by the Queen’s advisors as necessary to secure supply, were seen as hostile to English interests, and led to a welling-up of popular anti-Scottish feeling (Ferguson 1977: 222). Retaliation from Westminster came in the form of the ‘Act for the effectual securing of the Kingdom of England from the apparent dangers that might arise from several Acts lately passed in the Parliament of Scotland’, known as the Aliens Act. This threatened to treat the Scots as aliens, and restrict trade in cattle, linen and

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coal: a ‘naked piece of economic blackmail, designed to bring the Scottish parliament swiftly to the negotiating table’ (Devine 1999: 3; see also Whatley 2006: 213–4). The Act led to riots in Edinburgh, and ended Tweeddale’s spell as Commissioner. It emphasized the difficulties of running a Scottish government that was acceptable in Westminster and the London court. The Queen’s two parliaments were passing Acts that contradicted one another. Up to 1705 there was no clear majority in the Scottish Parliament for a coherent programme of government. The weakness of the constitutional institutions linking London and Edinburgh was exacerbated by a Scottish party system split between court, country, and Jacobite/Cavalier parties. The court interest was split by competition over patronage and places, most clearly seen in Queensberry’s obstruction of any lasting settlement whilst out of office. Riley (1978: 57) describes the anti-English programme pressed by the Scottish parliament in 1703–4 as a ruse to ‘embarrass the court’: On neither side were the leaders saying what they meant. The opposition talked of trade and a treaty; the court claimed that the best way to achieve such aims was by limitations and settlement of the succession. The latter were making the best of the task they had been given; the former were trying to sabotage their efforts. All the rest was just talk. (Riley 1978: 94)

Thus, it was a simple matter for the London court to influence negotiations in their own interest, using a combination of patronage and bribery, and Riley gives a detailed analysis of the financial resources used to buy votes and smooth the passage of the Act of Union through the Edinburgh Parliament. For Robertson (1995) on the other hand, the ideology of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun matters. Fletcher presented a blueprint for a federal constitution, whereby the dominance of London would be tempered by a limited monarchy, and parliamentary and military power diffused across a number of regional centres. This country Whig perspective challenged the centralizing vision of a United Kingdom based on Westminster Parliament controlling the regal territories. Fletcher’s radical constitutional alternative, and his strong denunciation of a venal and corrupt political system, threatened the traditional basis of Scottish government as fundamentally as the Union proposals. Fletcher and the Unionists agreed that the current mode of government in Scotland was unsustainable. The English discontent with the way that the Scottish establishment operated was clearly focused on the challenge to the regal union, and a wish to suppress the religious controversy associated with the Jacobite challenge; alongside a more administrative concern to simplify the regulation of trading, military concerns, and taxation.

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However, the opponents of Union failed to present a coherent alternative. In part, this was due to Hamilton’s weak leadership. Hamilton ‘bitterly resented’ Queensberry’s control of the Douglas clan of which they were both members, as well as Queensberry’s role as leader of the court interest; despite marriage to a wealthy English heiress, Hamilton was in constant financial difficulty;7 and his claim to the crown of Scotland, through descent from Mary Stuart (daughter of James II of Scotland), complicated his relations with the Jacobites and Queen Anne. These factors led to some otherwise incomprehensible decisions which undermined the anti-Union movement, notably his proposal to give Queen Anne the right to appoint the Scottish Commissioners to discuss Union (Whatley 2006: 224). He failed to support a popular rising against the Union, despite toying with the idea, and pleaded toothache when the time came to lead the parliamentary opposition to the passage of the Act of Union. (For more on Hamilton, his character, and his mother, see Whatley 2006 passim, esp. at 47, 172–3, 185–6.) Fletcher’s views were too radical to form a coalition across the middle ground of the Scottish establishment, and his ‘temper frequently let him down’ (Robertson 1997: xvii).8 At the inception of the Scottish Parliament, in May 1703, Fletcher set out his opposition to a court demand for supply, arguing that first ‘the house would take into consideration what acts are necessary to secure our religion, liberty, and trade’ (quoted in Robertson 1997: 131). As a supporter and advocate of the Act of Security and the Act anent Peace and War, Fletcher led the campaign for limitations on the English court. However, his proposals also sought to entrench the role of the Scottish parliament over patronage and procedure, presenting a constructive programme as an alternative to an incorporating union. These measures included the entrenchment of the elected portion of the parliament, and the right of the parliament to select the administration and appoint government officials. The Edinburgh Parliament would also have control over the military, and appointments to all military commissions (Robertson 1997: 138–9, 151). Fletcher was not a Scottish nationalist. There is ‘no denying that he was in favour of a degree of union between Scotland and England’ (Robertson 1987: 203). Despite Fletcher’s skill as a spokesman against the incorporating Union, his wider constitutional prescriptions were too radical to gain widespread popular and parliamentary support. The anti-Union coalition was so disparate, containing as it did Jacobites, country Whigs, extreme Presbyterians, and disappointed office-seekers, that even without Hamilton’s toothache and Fletcher’s temper it would have disintegrated. After the fall of the interim administrations led by Tweeddale and (in 1705) by Argyll, the court interest, again under the leadership of the Duke of Queensberry, was able to consolidate its support and present a united front in

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the votes on the Union. This may have been due to the bribery and patronage that Queensberry was able to command, but represented a greater coherence amongst the court interest that had previously been evident. It also showed that the London administration were willing to overcome their discontent with Queensberry’s earlier involvement with the ‘Scotch plot’. Queensberry returned as the Queen’s Commissioner for the 1706 session of the Scottish Parliament. This strengthening of the Court interest in Scotland coincided with a rare conjunction of English regal, military, administrative, and parliamentary agreement. The prospect of an incorporating Union brought together Queen Anne, Marlborough, Godolphin, and Harley, each of whom was persuaded to press the Unionist cause. For Queen Anne the Union represented the solution to the issue of the succession; to Marlborough the removal of a potential military weakness; for Godolphin the extension of administrative control over a recalcitrant region; and for Harley the entrenchment of Whig parliamentary authority. There had already been abortive negotiations over Union at the start of the new reign in 1702. Then the Scottish Commissioners had focused on trading concessions and the English were so uninterested that the proceedings had to be frequently adjourned because they could not raise a quorum (Mathieson 1905: 77–8; Ferguson 1977: 201–2). In 1706, there was a much greater sense of purpose. The Scottish Commissioners first proposed a federal union, a suggestion that was rejected out of hand by the English Commissioners. Clerk of Penicuik records that the federal scheme ‘was most favoured by the people of Scotland, but all the Scots Commissioners, to a Man, considered it rediculous and impracticable’ (Clerk 1892: 60). The Scottish Commissioners were also aware that the English Commissioners were unlikely to compromise on this point, being settled on an incorporating union. As it was probably common knowledge that the Scots would not, or could not, press hard for a federal scheme, once the parties settled on an incorporating union, negotiations were straightforward. The Scottish Parliament would be abolished, in return for representation within the new Great Britain Parliament (the extent of which was the only issue which forced a joint meeting of the negotiating teams; Speck 1994: 98). The monarchy was to be settled on the House of Hanover, provided that monarchs remained Protestant. There would be freedom of trade in the new state, but with certain aspects of the Scottish economy given a buffer of protection. The cost of taking on a share of the English (and Welsh) national debt would be addressed through the provision of compensation, which would also ameliorate the loss of trading rights given to the Company of Scotland. The negotiators agreed to organize the passage through the Scottish Parliament first, to be considered in London thereafter.

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The Scottish Parliament opened its session on 3 October 1706, with the reading of an address from Queen Anne, which stated ‘The Union has been long desired by both nations, and we shall esteem it as the greatest glory of our reign to have it now perfected’ (quoted in Speck 1994: 106). The articles were read, and the First Article which stated ‘That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall . . . be United into One Kingdom by the Name of GREAT BRITAIN’, was carried on 4 November 1706, by 116 votes to 83. The Scottish court were able to carry all of the twenty-five articles with only minor revision, and the Act of Union was ratified in Edinburgh on 16 January 1707 by 110 votes to 69. News of this reached London on 20 January, and the Act of Union was approved by both Houses of the Westminster Parliament by 24 February, and given the assent of Queen Anne on 6 March, with effect from 1 May 1707 (Speck 1994: 106–17). The key group of swing voters was nicknamed the Squadrone Volante. Table 3.1 replicates Riley’s allocation of party labels, set against the changing voting behaviour between 1703 and 1706 (Riley 1978: 328). Riley notes the strength of party voting across the parliament, suggesting that ‘Practically all voted their normal party line to an extent that is quite beyond coincidence’ (Riley 1978: 275). This is hard to square with the Namierite/nationalist parcel of rogues hypothesis. A parcel of rogues would have sought the advantages of aligning with court interest in order to gain the monetary benefits and patronage of union. Party cohesion, on the contrary, suggests that there were real ideological differences between the parliamentary groupings. Table 3.2 shows that the nobles were significantly more pro-Union than the other two orders.9 Riley (1969) and Ferguson (1968) place much of the weight of their explanation of the Scottish switch in attitudes towards Union on the proviTable 3.1 Party identification and voting in the Scottish Parliament 1703 and 1706. Country/Cavalier

Court

Squadrone

Total

3 2 1 43 17 14 3 5 6 94

53 3 30 0 7 2 7 0 5 107

1 20 3 0 0 0 0 2 1 27

57 25 34 43 24 16 10 7 12 228

Unionist in 1703 and 1706 Anti-union in 1703, pro in 1706 No vote 1703, pro-union 1706 Anti-union in 1703 and 1706 Pro-union in 1703, anti in 1706 No vote 1703, anti-union 1706 Pro-union 1703, no vote 1706 Anti-union 1703, no vote 1706 Other absent/abstained Total Source for all tables in this chapter: our data.

116

83

29

228

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Table 3.2 Membership of the Estates and voting in the Scottish Parliament on the First Article of the Act of Union.

Pro-union Anti-union No vote

Nobles

Barons/Shire

Burgh

Total

46 21 91 158

37 33 31 101

33 29 15 77

116 83 137 336

p of å2 < 0.001

sion of £20,000 sterling, secretly sent from London in order to cover the arrears of past and present office holders. However, the list of recorded arrears and payments (shown in Appendix B of Riley 1969) suggests that, although a large proportion of this went to the swing voters of the Squadrone Volante, this was largely to cover expenses incurred during Tweeddale’s tenure as Commissioner. Such payments are hard to distinguish from the general expenses incurred and recompensed from the treasury during the normal practice of parliamentary management. Queensberry was recorded as receiving £12,325, but this was against recorded arrears of £26,756, and he had received a larger amount in 1705, when out of favour with the London and Edinburgh courts, in recognition of arrears incurred in his earlier tenure as Commissioner. A far greater source of remuneration was through the payment of the ‘Equivalent’, designed to compensate for Scotland’s acceptance of a national debt, discussed below. Riley’s account does expose the underlying weakness of the popular basis of the Scottish Parliament. Whilst there was widespread popular opposition to the Union amongst the Scottish population, this was apparently incidental to the voting patterns in the Edinburgh Parliament. The Scottish MPs were insulated from popular opinion by the very limited extent of electoral participation. Scottish electorates in both shire and burgh constituencies were extremely small: Midlothian, with around a hundred voters, had the largest electorate, and most burghs had an electorate of twelve or fewer (Hayton 1996: 81). This ensured that the elections were easily controlled by the aristocratic interests. And in a unicameral parliament, unelected members of the nobility voted alongside the elected members. Fletcher saw the danger that the London court would attempt to exert influence over the parliament through the creation of new titles, which could tilt the balance within the parliament. His proposed limitations on the Crown included a provision ‘That so many lesser barons shall be added to the parliament, as there have been noblemen created . . . and that in all time

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coming, for every nobleman that shall be created, there shall be a baron added to the parliament’ (quoted in Robertson 1997: 138). Table 3.2 shows voting on the First Article of the Act of Union, broken down by estates. Whilst a majority of each of the estates was pro-Union on the key vote, the majority amongst the nobles was much larger than that of the members representing the counties and burghs of Scotland.10 Fletcher’s concerns about the ability of the London court to influence the Scottish aristocracy appear to be supported, although the causal links may be more complex: ‘That 1 in 7 Scottish nobles had English wives at the resumption of negotiations, testifies not only [to] their steady assimilation into the British ruling class, but also to their growing dependence on the English marriage market to build up disposable income’ (McNeill and MacQueen 1996: 151). The fact that membership of the aristocracy was associated with a greater interest in trade, both with England and abroad, has also been used to explain the greater propensity of the nobility to support the Union. Distinguishing between the responsiveness of members of the three estates of the Scottish Parliament to the debate over the Act of Union is complicated by the close kinship and patronage links between the different estates, but it appears that the nobility was more likely to swing Unionist, followed by the barons, whereas the burgh members who shifted allegiance were more likely to go to the anti-Unionist position. This may reflect a greater sensitiveness amongst the burgh members to public opinion within their constituencies. The extent to which public opinion was directed against the Union has been gauged by the number, and complete one-sidedness, of the petitions presented to the Scottish Parliament. Petitions were received from at least fifteen out of the thirty-three counties, and twenty-one of the sixty-seven royal burghs (Macinnes 1990: 12). All were opposed to the incorporating Union. Further to this pressure, sixty-two ‘exceptional and unsolicited addresses’ were delivered to the parliament, three from presbyteries, nine from towns, and fifty from parishes. ‘These addresses against the union came predominantly from west-central and south-western Scotland, where local communities drew consciously on covenanting traditions of supplicating in support of religious and civil liberties’ (McNeill and MacQueen 1996: 151). This glut of anti-Union activity has been taken to represent the widespread popular antipathy to the measure, as well as indicating grass-roots opposition to an incorporating union from members of the Presbyterian church. However, our analysis of the effect of petitions on the voting behaviour of members of the Edinburgh Parliament suggests that petitioning had little or no effect. Comparing positions in 1703 with the vote on the First Article of the Act of Union, controlling for whether there was a petition in the constituency, gives

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Table 3.3 Petitioning and vote-switching in the Scottish Parliament 1703–6.

Unionist in 1703 and 1706 Anti-union in 1703, pro in 1706 No vote 1703, pro-union 1706 Anti-union in 1703 and 1706 Pro-union in 1703, anti in 1706 No vote 1703, anti-union 1706 Pro-union 1703, no vote 1706 Anti-union 1703, no vote 1706 Other absent/abstained Total

Petition

No petition

10 15 2 23 8 6 3 8 8 83

29 4 10 8 10 7 12 7 8 95

p of å2 < 0.001

the pattern shown in Table 3.3. This shows that petitions, to a large extent, did reflect voting behaviour by constituency members. Petitions were more likely to be presented in constituencies where the member consistently opposed Union, and were less prevalent in those constituencies represented by stable pro-Union members. Similarly, of the members with no recorded position in 1703, the pro-Unionists tended not to come from constituencies where petitions were raised, whereas the anti-Unionists were more likely. The exception to this pattern is amongst the nineteen members, largely from the Squadrone Volante, who switched from an anti-Union position in 1703 to a pro-Union position in 1706. Fifteen of these faced petitions raised in their constituencies, a sign that there was popular opposition to their change in voting allegiance. The fact that the simple relationship between petitions and vote is non-significant (Macinnes 1990), whereas the more complex relationship shown in Table 3.3 is significant, shows that petitions reflected rather than induced voting behaviour. The realpolitik of pro-Union politicians like the duke of Argyll and the earl of Mar seems justified. Argyll suggested that the petitions were only fit to make kites of, and Mar suggested that the proUnion campaign had left it too late, and that few pro-Union petitions would look worse than none (Ferguson 1964: 109–10).

‘ TR A DE W I T H M OS T. . . ’ Union has been presented as creating ‘an Anglo-Scottish common market that was the biggest customs-free zone in Europe’ (Smout 1969a: 215).

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Whatley (2000: 1) suggests that famine in the 1690s caused the death of between 10 and 20 per cent of the Scottish population. This economic weakness was compounded by the expensive failure of Darien. This free-trade interpretation of the Union can be challenged from a number of positions. First, studies of the extent to which any cross-border tariffs were effective before the Union, and the extent to which common excise duties were imposed after the Union, suggest that the Union only provided a blurred distinction between trading practices (Smout 1964: 458; Saville 1996: 65–6). Secondly, there was a shared appreciation on both sides of the border, that protectionist measures could cut both ways; which meant that free trade was not necessarily seen as a positive benefit (Whatley 1989). Yet the demand for free trade with England had been frequently raised from Scotland, and the threat of economic sanctions was used by the English as a means of putting pressure on the Scottish Parliament to accede to a Parliamentary Union, through the Aliens Act of 1705. Promoters of the Union, such as Daniel Defoe, stressed the benefits of free trade to the Scottish economy (Smout 1964: 463–4), and Fletcher noted that the prospect of greater trading benefits was ‘the bait that covers the hook’ (quoted in Whatley 2001: 57). Marlborough said in 1706: ‘the true state of the matter was, whether Scotland should continue subject to an English Ministry without trade, or be subject to an English Parliament with trade’ (quoted in Young 1999: 25). Marlborough’s position as favourite of the Queen and military destroyer of the French depended on a governmental revolution in terms of taxation and finance. In this area, rather than the expansion of free trade, lay the main benefits of Union for the English state. Scottish government had been a distraction to the Queen’s English ministers. Union would remove a potential rival to the establishment of a monopolistic trading empire. It also offered scope for a more robust tax regime. A number of historians have attempted to link voting in the Edinburgh Parliament on the Acts of Union to the specific economic interests of Scottish members of parliament. Both Riley (1978: 276) and Smout (1963: 263) note that the nobility had a particularly strong interest in the export market for Scottish goods; and that this could have explained their greater likelihood of supporting the Union (see Table 3.2). Free-market arguments cut both ways: although a majority of those Scots involved in the making of the Treaty clearly grasped the opportunity of access to the English and colonial markets while it was on offer, others were equally concerned to obtain as many safeguards as possible to defend vulnerable elements of what . . . was an exceedingly fragile economy. (Whatley 1989: 159)

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In particular, the Scottish salt industry, and the coal production which supported it, were both extremely vulnerable to competition. Whatley (2001: 60) suggests that members of each of the estates had (or represented) significant trading interests, but that such considerations offer little additional explanatory power. The fact that the fifteen of the twenty articles of the Act of Union concerned economic aspects may seem to represent the importance of trade in the making of the treaty. However, those fifteen can be divided into three groups: those dealing with free-trade; those dealing with customs and duties and the extent of temporary measures protecting Scottish industry; and those dealing with the compensation for the adoption of English and Welsh national debt. The key free-trade Article was the fourth, which stated ‘That all the Subjects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain shall from and after the Union have full Freedom and Intercourse of Trade and Navigation’. This was accompanied by four other Articles (5, 6, 17, and 18) which set out the free-trade basis of the state, establishing a British navy, a common currency, and system of weights and measures. Nine Articles (6 to 14) dealt with the unified system of customs and duties, and contained a large number of concessions designed to protect Scottish trading interests, including the beer and liquor trade, salt, fishing, paper, and coal industries. Finally, Article 15 dealt with the payment of the ‘Equivalent’, amounting to just under £400,000 sterling, to compensate Scotland for the higher taxation and adoption of the English and Welsh national debt. Thus, the Treaty of Union delivered free trade, tempered by a number of measures protecting supposedly vulnerable areas of the Scottish economy. It also shows that the Westminster Parliament was willing to accept significant concessions to Scottish trading interests. Article 4 was passed with the largest majority of any Article: securing 154 supporting votes versus 19 against; 31 members who had hitherto voted against union changed sides to support Article 4. This was despite Fletcher’s attempt to make Article 4 a central element of the opposition attack on Union (Riley 1978: 288). As Table 3.4 shows, the Article received support from the most consistent opponents of the Union programme. But in 1707 (and still in 1800) free trade connoted access to markets, not removal of protection. In contrast to the smooth passage of Article 4 of the Act of Union, the Articles dealing with customs and duties (referred to as the ‘explanations’) were much more contentious, and led to significant amendments to the negotiated treaty, all adding elements of protection for particular aspects of Scottish trade and industry. Indeed, Article 8, dealing with the Salt Tax, involved the court’s only defeat during the passage of the Act of Union (on an amendment demanding drawbacks on the export of salted beef and pork; Macinnes 1990: 17). The Scottish Parliament succeeded in adding a number of amendments to the draft treaty negotiated in London (Whatley

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Table 3.4 Vote on Article 4 (free trade) and vote-switching in the Scottish Parliament 1703–6.

Unionist in 1703 and 1706 Anti-union in 1703, pro in 1706 No vote 1703, pro-union 1706 Anti-union in 1703 and 1706 Pro-union in 1703, anti in 1706 No vote 1703, anti-union 1706 Pro-union 1703, no vote 1706 Anti-union 1703, no vote 1706 Other absent/abstained Total

For Article 4

Against Article 4

54 25 30 12 12 7 5 4 4 154

– – – 13 2 3 1 – – 19

p of å2 not calculated because of empty cells.

2001), much to the consternation of Godolphin who was worried that this could complicate the passage of the Act of Union through the Westminster Parliament (Riley 1978: 291). These amendments were nevertheless accepted by the court, and carried without significant numbers of defections. However, the passage of the ‘explanations’, and the success of the Scottish Parliament in adding protectionist measures, show the limitations of a purely free-trade explanation of the passage of the Act of Union. The Articles of Union were amended to include a number of (albeit temporary) protectionist measures. The third economic element of the Act of Union was the payment of the ‘Equivalent’, ostensibly compensation for the adoption of the burden of the English and Welsh national debt. The details of this, and the way that payment would be channelled (largely to stockholders in the Company of Scotland, responsible for the Darien venture) were outlined in Article 15. The prohibition on capitalization of the Company in London (at the behest of the English East India Company) had forced the directors to focus on raising money in Scotland, and it became a great patriotic enterprise, with pledges for the revised capitalization of £400,000 reached within six months of the subscriptions opening in February 1696 (Devine 2003: 42). Andrew Fletcher wrote in 1698 that ‘no Scotsman is an enemy’ to the Company of Scotland (quoted in Robertson 1997: 38). Fletcher linked support for the Company of Scotland to his broader schemes of limitations on monarchy, using the obstructions imposed by King William to illustrate the weakness of the Scottish interest under the existing scheme of joint monarchy. The Company of Scotland had highlighted the potential threat to English monopoly trading rights, most particularly associated with the East India

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Companies; also the possibility that an independent Scotland could free-ride on English military expansion, undermining trade and revenue from customs and excise. But Darien also undermined Scottish economic confidence; for contemporaries ‘it seemed . . . that Scotland was on the verge of economic collapse’ (Smout 1964: 459). This helped swing the general debate on the trading benefits of Union towards Clerk and the Unionists, whereas the economic arguments of the anti-Unionists were ‘distinctly old-fashioned and more fundamentally unrealistic’ (Smout 1964: 485). However, Darien led to popular fury culminating in the judicial murder of the captain and two officers of the Worcester, an English ship rumoured to have sunk one of the Darien vessels, which put into Leith docks in 1705. Thus, Darien was an economic disaster to the Scots but also a political threat to the English. The London court sought to relieve both by directing payments to stockholders in return for a union. This would remove a potential source of rivalry to the East India Company, which was subsequently free to exploit its monopolistic trading rights. The parliamentary union helped consolidate this monopolistic control of trading rights, and restricted the ability of Scottish entrepreneurs to undermine English trading interests by free-riding on the back of English military and territorial expansion. From 1702 compensation for the losses incurred in the Darien venture, totalling £153,631—estimated to be one-quarter of Scotland’s entire capital stock—were made part of the Scottish negotiations over a possible incorporating union (Riley 1978: 35, 199). This compensation was linked to the payment of the ‘Equivalent’, the sum of money paid to Scotland upon Union in order to assuage the burden of the English national debt, which a unitary state would have to bear. The ‘Equivalent’ was calculated on the basis of English pre-Union debts, but there was no clear way of distributing this financial largesse. Whilst a great deal of consideration was given to calculating the total amount, which was agreed at £398,085 10s, much larger than the assessed losses from Darien, the issue of who should receive it was given much less consideration. Rather than defraying past or future tax payments across the Scottish nation, it was appropriated by a number of sectional interests: those who had lost out from the switch from Scottish to English coinage; the shareholders of the Company of Scotland; the Scottish woollen industry; and allowances to Commissioners who negotiated the Union. Further patronage was exercised in setting up a Committee which was designed to spend the ‘Equivalent’, with suitable compensation. Members were paid expenses of £920 a year (Riley 1964: 208, 214). As such, the ‘Equivalent’ provided a much greater source of patronage than the amount of money which was seen as being covertly shifted to Scotland to ease the passage of the Union.

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The ‘Equivalent’ arrived belatedly in an armed convoy of wagons (Whatley 2006: 330). The English exchequer could not afford to pay it all in cash, so bills were issued; a situation that it helped establish the Bank of Scotland, which was charged with overseeing the exchange (Scott 1911: 268). The compensation was directed at those with the clearest claim, and so subscribers to the Company of Scotland and the Union Commissioners received first charge. For more ambiguous recipients, such as the woollen traders, the result was less satisfactory: They ‘could not be paid because nobody had been named in the Act anent the Public Debts to receive it’ (Riley 1964: 212). The rest of the Scottish population received nothing. Debates over the liabilities of creditors to the Scottish government prior to 1707 continued to 1724, and holders of ‘Equivalent’ debt ended up by creating a joint stock bank in the form of the Royal Bank of Scotland (Riley 1964: 229). Thus, two of the biggest banks in the present-day United Kingdom—what are now part of Lloyds Group (after its shotgun takeover of HBOS in late 2008) and the Royal Bank of Scotland owe their origins to the Scottish Equivalent. However, support for the Darien venture does not correlate with support or opposition for an incorporating Union; two of the leading activists in the scheme took diametrically opposed views on the Union. William Paterson returned from Darien (where his wife had died) to write pro-Unionist propaganda, and he acted as an agent for the English minister Robert Harley. Andrew Fletcher, meanwhile, saw the failure of the Darien expedition (to which he had subscribed £1,000) as an illustration of the subjugation of Scottish to English trading interests, a situation which would only be worsened if the Scottish Parliament were to be abolished. Similarly, the leader of the Court interest who pushed the Union through the Edinburgh Parliament, the Duke of Queensberry, had subscribed £3,000; as had a leading opponent of the Union, Lord Belhaven. The Duchess of Hamilton opened the subscription with a promise of £1,000. In his analysis of the socio-economic and geographical basis of the Company of Scotland subscription lists W. Douglas Jones (2001: 33–4) identifies 170 subscribers (12.0 per cent of the total number, contributing 16.4 per cent of the total capital) who served as Members of Parliament, Privy Councillors, ministers of state, or high court judges, including 57 members of Parliament who sat between 1696 and 1700. Comparing a list of all Darien subscribers (A perfect list . . . 1696) with our database of members of the Scottish Parliament of 1703–7, there are ninety-nine members of parliament who can be (with varying degrees of certainty) linked to a subscription to the Company of Scotland, contributing £62,850 (15.7 per cent) of the total. Tables 3.5 and 3.6 suggest that, despite the strong incentives for Darien compensation and its association with direct recompense through

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Table 3.5 Voting on the First Article in the Scottish Parliament compared to Darien stockholding. Stockholders’ votes (%) For Against Total

41 (55%) 33 (45%) 74

Average stock (£) 658.54 604.55 638.46

Non-stockholders’ votes (%) 75 (60%) 50 (40%) 125

Total votes (%) 116 (58%) 83 (42%) 199

Article 1, 4th November 1706: That the two kingdoms of England and Scotland shall upon the 1st day of May next . . . , and forever after, be united into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain. p of å2 = 0.53, not significant.

Table 3.6 Voting on the Fifteenth Article (providing an ‘Equivalent’) in the Scottish Parliament compared to Darien stockholding. Stockholders’ votes (%) For Against Total

44 (73%) 16 (27%) 60

Average stock (£) 647.73 665.63 652.50

Non-stockholders’ votes (%) 68 (64%) 38 (36%) 106

Total votes (%) 112 (68%) 54 (33%) 166

p of å2 = 0.23, not significant.

the ‘Equivalent’, it does not appear to be a significant factor in the overall passage of the Act of Union in Edinburgh. Whilst the average stockholdings in the Company of Scotland were higher amongst those who favoured the Union, possession of stock does not appear to have been an indicator of voting one way or the other. Non-stockholders were more likely to vote for the Union. The relationships in Tables 3.5 and 3.6 are not significant. Breaking down the seventy-four members who voted on the first article of the Union according to their position in the 1703 session of parliament shows that thirteen members subscribing to Darien switched to a pro-Union stance, but ten switched the other way. It seems that the large amounts of money available in compensation for Darien subscribers included in the Union had no effect on the voting patterns in the Scottish Parliament. Riley (1978) argues that short-term gain was the incentive behind most of the voting on the Union. If this were the case, then Darien subscribers should have been much more likely to switch to a pro-Union position. They were not. Even on the vote on Article 15, which set out the conditions for repayment of the ‘Equivalent’, largely to stockholders of the Company of Scotland, there was very little cross-voting amongst MPs who would directly benefit.

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The final recorded vote (until 1999) of the Scottish Parliament, on 10 March 1707, concerned the payment of compensation to the Company of Scotland’s shareholders, and the issue of whether it should be paid to proprietors or through a committee of appointed commissioners. The vote went in favour of a commission, by thirty votes to eleven; twenty-nine MPs coded as having held Darien stock voted, with twenty-two in favour and seven against. There is no significant difference between the voting pattern of stockholders and non-stockholders (p of å2¼0.55). Union brought Scotland within the ambit of what was becoming an established and efficient tax-gathering establishment (Saville 1996: 5). Furthermore, it prevented the possibility of tax competition between Scotland and England, whereby trade and investment could be easily diverted from one to the other. It also restricted, although did not totally rule out, tax evasion through imports from Scotland. Under the guidance of Lord Godolphin, Lord Treasurer between 1703 and 1710, the tax-raising functions of the government were consolidated, and allied to a system of long-term loans which reduced uncertainty over the liquidity of government and the markets. The land tax, levied at four shillings in the pound, was the ‘chief pillar of direct taxation’, and underwrote approximately two-thirds of the government’s long-term debt (Dickson 1967: 358). The figures for England and Wales show an expansion in the share of national income appropriated as taxation (calculated in constant price values) from 6.7 per cent in 1690 to 9.2 per cent in 1710 (O’Brien 1988: 3, table 2). Fletcher had argued in favour of a Scottish land tax, in order to place the government of Scotland on a firmer fiscal footing (1698 in Robertson 1997: 41), although this was contingent on greater autonomy over how the finances raised would be spent. He got his way through the Union he despised. The raising of public debt was facilitated by the success of the East India Companies, which provided finance for the Exchequer, and the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. This was consolidated by the close links between these companies and parliament. Interest rates on East India bonds fell from 6 per cent between 1688 and September 1705, to 5 per cent between September 1705 and September 1708 (Dickson 1967: 411, table 67), and this was associated with a general lowering of interest rates on (English) government borrowing over the period in which the Union with Scotland was forged (Table 3.7). That the government was able to raise money at lower interest after Union than before is eloquent. In Scotland, the Bank of Scotland and the Darien Companies had been unable to provide a comparable basis for a government debt. The Scottish economy was, somewhat surprisingly, capable of financing the capital calls of both the Company and the Bank of Scotland, but such investment was

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Table 3.7 Government long-term borrowing (1704–8). Date of royal assent to Loan Act 24 Feb 1704 16 Jan 1705 16 Feb 1706 27 Mar 1707 13 Feb 1708 11 March 1708

Sum raised (£)

Interest (%)

1,382,976 690,000 2,855,762 1,155,000 640,000 2,280,000

6.6 6.6 6.4 6.25 6.25 6.25

Source: Dickson (1967: table 3, 60–1).

unsustainable in the light of the lack of returns from both these issues, and by 1697 there was a credit crisis (Jones 2001: 38). Although the transformation of the credit culture in Scotland over this period has been described as providing ‘the core of the financial revolution that occurred in Scotland during the eighteenth century’ (Jones 2001: 39), it is probably safer to date the transformation from 1707, the Fifteenth Article, and the Bank of Scotland (later joined by the Royal Bank) trading in government debt. There was no adverse market reaction to Union.

‘Hanover with some’ The support for an incorporating union given by King William and Queen Anne removed any possibility of the use of the Crown veto over the Acts of Union passed by the Edinburgh and Westminster Parliament. Both monarchs had lobbied hard for such a measure, and Queen Anne attended the Westminster Parliament during the final debates on the Act of Union, in an expression of her support. However, despite the influence of the Crown over the running of the executive in London and Edinburgh, and powers of patronage through the court interest, this was subject to parliamentary control. William’s desire for a parliamentary union was frustrated by Westminster’s indifference, and Anne was forced to endure and endorse the outcomes of a hostile parliament in Edinburgh during the 1703–5 sessions. To understand the debate over ‘Hanover’, one should focus less on the possibilities of the breaking of the dual monarchy or a Jacobite alternative (although these were certainly issues at the time) than on the religious basis of government in Britain. In Scotland, the relationship between the kirk and monarchy had drawn them into the English Civil War (otherwise known as the War of Three Kingdoms). ‘The Kirk became the most formidable opponent of the [union] project’ (Devine 2003: 50–4). However, by the time of the vote on the Articles of the Act of Union this opposition had been

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neutered by concessions to the leaders of the Presbyterian church, which had entrenched itself in 1689–90 as the established church in Scotland. William Carstares, the Scottish Presbyterian leader, acted as chaplain of William of Orange, and played a crucial role in establishing the kirk in the Williamite constitutional settlement. Whilst less close to Queen Anne, Carstares was active in the promotion of the Union from his position as Principal of the University of Edinburgh, minister of Greyfriars’ church, and a prominent member of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church. When the Articles were brought before the Scottish Parliament, Presbyterians were dismayed to find that they contained no protection for them. One minister wrote, in the psalter-metre of the metrical 124th Psalm: If that our church had fully been secured And if that we had finallie procur’d Establishment, we should not have gainstood The work, had it been for religious good.11 (Quoted in Stephen 2007: 90).

The central issue was entrenchment of the Presbyterian established church in Scotland, against the episcopal and Jacobite movements, by An Act for the Security of the True Protestant Religion and Government of the Church, passed alongside the Acts of Union (and incorporated with them so that it is still in force). As Carstares wrote to Harley in October 1706, ‘the desire I have to see our Church secured makes me in love with the Union as the most probable means to preserve it’ (quoted in Dunlop 1967: 115). Whilst this was not the unanimous view of the Presbyterian clergy, the pro-Union leaders were able to prevent outright hostility to the Union becoming an issue associated with the church (Macree 1973: 71–3; Stephen 2007). The approach of Carstares was supported and encouraged by Daniel Defoe, whose role as propagandist for the Union involved reassurance that the change in the constitution would not threaten the Presbyterian church. In September 1706, Defoe described his own role in Edinburgh being ‘To remove the jealousies and uneasiness of people about secret designs here against the Kirk’ (quoted in Macree 1973: 65). The presbyteries had proved a source of organized opposition to an incorporating Union, associated with various petitions raised against the measure. The vote on the Act was held on 12 November 1706, in between the votes on the First and Second Articles of the Act of Union. The timing of this vote was perhaps determined by Lord Belhaven’s effective speech against the First Article of Union. The Act was passed by 113 to 38; a larger majority than the key vote on the First Article. There was a very strong association between support for the First Article of the Act of Union and

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support for the Act for the Security of the . . . Church. Ninety-five members of the Edinburgh Parliament supported both measures, and no pro-Union members voted against the establishment of the Presbyterian church. However, the opponents of the Union were more clearly divided on the measure, with eleven of the eighty-three members who had voted against the First Article voting for Presbyterian establishment. Whilst opponents of the Union made up nearly all of the thirty-eight votes against the Act for the Security of the . . . Church, more abstained on this than voted against. Comparing voting patterns between 1703, the First Article of the Act of Union, and the Act for the Security of the . . . Church shows that there was very little difference in the abstention rate within those members who had been solidly pro-Union and those who had switched to a pro-Union stance between 1703 and 1706 (McLean and McMillan 2005). However, those who had switched from proto anti-Union positions, or had newly joined the anti-Union camp were less likely to vote against the Act for the Security of the . . . Church when compared to those who had consistently opposed unionist measures from 1703. This gives some support to the argument that the issue of Presbyterian establishment cut across the anti-Unionist support base. Thus, the incorporation of Presbyterian church establishment played the same role in the creation of Great Britain as the US Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments of the US Constitution) played in the creation of the United States. In each case the concession to the anti-federalists won enough of them over for union to pass, where it would otherwise have failed. Establishment brought the leadership of the kirk into sympathy with the court party, and exposed the divisions on religious issues amongst the opponents of Union in Scotland. Further to this, a similar process occurred in London, where a similar Act entrenching the Church of England was passed alongside the Act of Union at Westminster. Whilst there is limited evidence on voting patterns in the Westminster Parliament on this issue, it undoubtedly helped assuage Tory doubts as to the religious basis of the constitution. There was opposition from high-church Tories, led by Sir John Pakington, who saw a conflict between the Queen’s roles as head of the Church of England and upholder of the Church of Scotland; but opposition in both the House of Lords and House of Commons was limited. In the Commons the third reading of the Act of Union was passed 274 votes to 116. In the Lords, attempts to challenge the role of the Scottish church were defeated fifty-five to nineteen (Speck 1994: 114–16). Because the Scots had brought credible threats to the table, the English were forced to swallow the establishment of a rival church in Scotland.

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‘Ease and security’ The Cromwellian Union, imposed through conquest in 1654 after the battles of Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651), had raised the question of whether Scotland could survive as an independent nation. The issue of military security was reinforced in 1706 by the mobilization of troops northwards. Godolphin told the Earl of Leven that forces were stationed ‘to bee in a readiness in case this ferment should continue to give any farther disturbance to the publick peace’ (Ferguson 1977: 256). However, the focus of English military concerns in 1706 was not Scotland, but Europe. Whilst the negotiations over the basis of an incorporating Union were being thrashed out at Westminster, Marlborough was winning the battle of Ramillies on 12 May. Union with Scotland may have had a military advantage in consolidating the base of the British military territory (although this was challenged in 1708, 1715, and 1745), but it also absorbed Scotland into the English model of governmental and military relations. Again, this is associated with the ‘financial revolution’ in England, which was closely tied in to the expansionist military commitments of the government under William and Mary and Queen Anne. Military expenditure between 1702 and 1713 accounted for some 72 per cent of total government expenditure, and amounted to some £93,644,560, a third of which was financed by loans (O’Brien 1988: 2, table 1; Dickson 1967: 10, table 1). According to the English Commissioners for Union in 1702, Scotland gained from the success of the British military state: the sayd [English Government] debts have been contracted by a long War entered into more particularly for the Preservation of England & the dominions thereunto belonging, yet that Scotland has tasted of the Benefits which have accrued to Great Brittain in general from the Opposition that has been made to the Growth and Power of France. (quoted in Dickson 1967: 8)

The relationship between the military and the government provided one of the focuses for the anti-Union campaign in Scotland. Fletcher’s militia campaign was overshadowed by the importance of the war against France in the run up to 1707. The presence of a standing army was less controversial during war—the main debate centred on how the military forces of the state should be maintained during peacetime. The European campaign also brought together Scots fighting in the Scottish, English, and Dutch armies; a common cause that would be enhanced by a more coherent organization. Fletcher’s ideas about a militia took root not in Great Britain but in the United States. The ‘country Whigs’, of whom he was one, argued as he

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did that militias preserved freedom whereas standing armies threatened it. The leaders of the American Revolution, above all Thomas Jefferson, took over country Whig ideology wholesale as it suited their politics and their temperaments. The protection of state militias is therefore written into the US Constitution in the Second Amendment, which guarantees ‘the right to bear arms’ to their members.

Representation and finance England and Wales returned 513 members to the House of Commons, and Scotland was first offered 38 (it had had 30 under Cromwell). This was above the ratio of tax contributions, which were closer to 28:513, but below the population ratio, on which basis Scotland should have returned perhaps 100 seats—although no reliable population estimates were yet available for either country (Speck 1994: 100). The Scottish Commissioners proposed a representation of fifty seats, and a compromise was struck at forty-five, alongside sixteen members of the House of Lords. This settlement was entrenched in the Twenty-Second Article of the Act of Union. The passage of Article 22 was meant to be the last-ditch stand of the opponents of the incorporating Union, but was the occasion of the Duke of Hamilton’s toothache. The importance of the Article lay not only in the general principle of Scottish representation, but in the mechanics by which the Scottish members of the Westminster Parliament would be chosen. The fact that the Westminster Parliament had decided that the passage of the Union would not be accompanied by a general election across the newly constituted state before the (English and Welsh) general election required by 1708 meant that the Scottish Parliament had to select its own method of representation in the first British Parliament in Westminster. This led to a period of intensive (and antagonistic) bargaining amongst members of the three estates (Riley 1978: 293), over the basis of Scottish representation. In the end, the parliament decided to choose its own delegates to Westminster on the basis of the existing parliamentary majority in Edinburgh. If the motives behind Scottish members of parliament voting for Union were largely determined by patronage, then 112 burgh and shire, and 144 noble, turkeys voted for Christmas (albeit with many receiving a rich stuffing). Acceptance of the incorporating Union would deny a huge swathe of the Scottish political establishment the future possibility of patronage and preferment.

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Neither statesmen nor rogues From 1690 the Scottish Parliament had become more assertive and independent, but it had not established the fiscal or administrative basis which would support such an independent role. Its assertiveness brought it into conflict with the trading, military, and regal interests of the English state. An alternative constitutional structure could perhaps have embraced these competing interests, but the opposition to an incorporating union was divided along ideological and pragmatic lines. Scottish members of parliament were willing to exchange direct involvement in a system of administrative patronage which delivered limited returns, in favour of a more powerful system of executive authority. We have grouped interpretations of the 1707 Union into:  Diceyan (incorporating union as a supreme act of statesmanship)  Nationalist/Namierite (a parcel of rogues in a nation were bought and sold for English gold)  Free-trading (Roxburgh’s Trade with most)  Uncertainty-reducing (Hanover with some)  Welfare-maximizing (a general aversion to civil discords, intolerable poverty and . . . constant oppression). On our historical and statistical evidence, the eighteenth-century Earl was nearer the truth than twentieth-century scholars. The Dicey view, seeing only an incorporating Union, overlooks the extent to which the Union of 1707 was a compromise and a bargain between Westminster and Edinburgh Parliaments. The Act of Union as approved by the Parliament of Scotland included a number of concessions to the trading interests of the Scottish members of parliament. More importantly, it entrenched the Presbyterian church in Scotland. This helped neutralize opposition to the Union within Scotland, but also ended Tory aspirations for an Episcopalian settlement. The entrenchment of two different versions of Protestant truth, via the Scottish and English church establishment Acts that are both incorporated in the final Act of Union, has remained a fundamental feature of the British Constitution ever since. We return to it in later chapters. Perhaps our most important finding is negative. The relationship between Darien holding and vote on Union is not statistically significant (Tables 3.5 and 3.6). That non-significance is of great substantive significance. It destroys the Namierites’ central contention. Those who held Darien stock were no more prone to be bought and sold with English gold than those who did not. Trade was a big issue, but commentators schooled in (neo)classical economics

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misconstrue it. The classical view, developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, is that both sides of a customs union always gain from trade. Smith had seen the huge growth of the Scottish economy in his own lifetime. But it did not immediately follow the union. The negotiators of the Union thought of trade as a weapon, not as a positive-sum game. The two nations could threaten one another’s trade—Scotland could threaten the East India Company, and England could counter-threaten by harassing the Darien Company or by the anti-Scottish Acts mentioned above. A trade treaty was a promise to put down the weapons, not a chance to gain from Ricardian comparative advantage, which was not understood in 1706. Because so many modern commentators forget that Union was a bargain, they miss Roxburgh’s last two points. Bargainers do not strike a deal unless both parties think that they will gain. Union was uncertainty-reducing and welfare-maximizing for both the English and the Scottish negotiators. For the English, reducing uncertainty about the succession meant that the northern frontier was secured and the Jacobite threat contained. Most of the voters for the Duke of Hamilton’s Resolve were not Jacobites. They were shrewd bargainers, whose credible threat brought the English to the table. Though they would have preferred a federal union, the Scottish negotiators did not try very hard to get one. They were content with incorporating union on the terms they got. It took some time before Scotland’s intolerable poverty was lifted, and then (from the mid-eighteenth century) it was largely due to economic forces the bargainers of 1706 did not understand. Dicey was right that the Acts of 1707 brought fundamental change, although he and his followers have characterized it wrongly. We follow some of these changes in subsequent chapters. The Union made the Empire possible. It seemed to swallow Scottish politics up into English politics to make British politics. Actually, it never did that.

Ireland’s incorporation: an ‘excusable mistake’? I have long suspected the Union of 1800. There was a case for doing something: but this was like Pitt’s Revolutionary War, a gigantic though excusable mistake (W. E. Gladstone, diary for 19.09.1885 in Matthew 1990: 403).

The Union of Great Britain with Ireland to form the United Kingdom was intended to be a bargain, like its predecessor; but one of the terms (Catholic emancipation) had to remain unspoken because of its bitter enemies in the Irish Parliament and on the throne. After the Irish Parliament had dissolved itself, King George III vetoed emancipation.

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In Scotland, William III’s succession saw the emergence of an assertive parliamentary system which strained the constitutional basis of a dual monarchy, and which, in turn, exposed the difficulties of reconciling the economic, military, and political interests of Scotland and England (and Wales). In Ireland, the Williamite succession led to a regal constitutional settlement which was, for the first century, much easier to manage from London. James II invaded Ireland, hoping to regain his throne with support from (especially Catholic) Irish people. After a campaign which defined the selfimage of Ulster Protestants to this day, the Williamite forces resisted the siege of Londonderry and finally, led by William himself, defeated James decisively at the Battle of the Boyne on 12 July (1 July old style)12 1690. The military defeat of James II in Ireland led to the establishment of the Protestant (and constitutionally Anglican) ascendancy. The eighteenth-century Irish Parliament and government were therefore closely tied in with the interests of the English court. The constitutional settlement of 1690 had established the control of a narrowly based Anglican ascendancy in Ireland. Against (the Dutch Reformed, religiously liberal) King William’s desire for a conciliatory settlement, his military victory in Ireland was consolidated through the entrenchment of the Protestant (Anglican) ascendancy. The Irish administration was organized on the basis of the mutual interests of the Church of Ireland and the British government. Property law privileged Anglicans and deprived Catholics and (to a lesser extent) Protestant dissenters of rights of succession. They were given franchise rights in the Irish Parliament in 1793. If that Parliament had continued its independent path, their property rights might have been improved. But it was extinguished. As under the US Constitution, there was a complete separation of powers between the Dublin Castle administration (purely an executive) and the Irish Parliament (purely a legislature). The Irish Parliament was weaker than the Scots Parliament had been. In 1690, only Anglicans were eligible to sit and vote in it. The largest denomination (Catholics) and the second-largest (Presbyterians, almost all in Ulster) were excluded. It did not control the executive. The monarch was not reliant on the Dublin Parliament for control of tax revenue, and there was no great challenge to the major trading interests of the London stock market. Until 1782, there was a common interest between the Crown and the Irish protestant ascendancy in maintaining a military presence in the interests of civil control and the prevention of foreign invasion, as well as a common interest in the continued sovereignty of an English-based monarch. By 1798 it was clear to Prime Minister Pitt the Younger and his inner circle that the divided government of Ireland could

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deliver neither security nor revenue. Pitt had wanted an economic union earlier, because he was a close reader of Adam Smith, but had been foiled by special interests. The breakdown started with the grant of greater legislative independence to the bicameral Irish Parliament in 1782. The American War of Independence, whose ideology found particularly strong resonance amongst the non-conformist Irish in Ulster (Lecky 1902: 159–60; Stewart 1993: chapters 1–7), gave rise to the alarming Volunteer movement.13 Conceding greater legislative autonomy was a concession to the Volunteers, and stability was enhanced by the control of John Beresford over the Dublin administration, based on a political grouping known as the ‘friends of English government’ (Johnston 1963: 72). The rival faction was those we have labelled ‘country Whigs’ suspicious of government and centralization. The leader of these country Whigs was Henry Grattan and the Parliament came to be known, to nineteenth-century Irish nationalists, as ‘Grattan’s parliament’. In 1785, the youthful Pitt put forward his ‘commercial propositions’ for a free-trade zone, embracing Ireland and Britain, as Adam Smith had recently proposed in the Wealth of Nations (Hague 2004: 185–91; McLean 2006: 22–3). This would have repealed all discriminatory protectionist legislation hindering Irish economic development; both parties would have gained. But the British Commons voted them down under pressure for vested interests; there was no scheme acceptable to both the British and Irish Parliaments; and Pitt’s attention moved elsewhere. But in October 1785 he wrote to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the Irish author: An Union with Ireland with Great Britain will doubtless meet with strong opposition on your side of the water . . . [but] mature reflection may in the end convince your nation of its equity, and even of its expediency; for the fundamental principles of political and commercial connection seem to me to require an equal participation of burthens as of benefits, of expenses as of profits. (Reilly 1979: 161)

The next crisis came four years later, when George III first became too ill to function as king. As the Scottish Parliament’s rejection of the Hanoverian succession had threatened Queen Anne’s English advisors, so the Irish Parliament’s proposal to appoint the Prince of Wales (the future George IV) as Regent in 1789 threatened the Pitt administration. The Prince of Wales was a bosom friend of Pitt’s enemy Fox, and a Regent-controlled Parliament in either country would have immediately voted out Pitt and installed Fox. In London, Pitt successfully played for time until the king recovered. But the dynastic threat of Ireland remained.

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A more pressing threat arose after 1793, when Britain declared war against revolutionary France. Catholic Ireland was an obvious security weakness to Protestant Britain. The French had supported James II up to the Boyne; and there was an opportunistic French naval raid on Carrickfergus in Protestant Ulster, in 1760 during the Seven Years’ War (Stewart 1993: 9–19). The French government had an interest in exploiting widespread Irish (Catholic and Presbyterian) discontent. There were four military threats. First, the direct threat—realized in 1760 and 1798—of a French landing in Ireland to attack Britain from the west. Second, the Irish ports provided an important strategic base, extending British naval control over shipping routes (in particular) to the Americas. Third, the British army was dispersed around Ireland to cope with domestic unrest, such as that instigated by groups of agrarian protestors. Finally, as the international military commitments of the British increased, Ireland became an increasingly important recruiting ground for the British army. By the 1770s the enlistment of Catholics was a practical necessity. In 1774, Irish Catholics were first permitted to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown without violation of conscience (Beckett 1966: 214). At the start of the eighteenth century Irishmen comprised about 5 per cent of the rank and file of the army, whilst by the start of the nineteenth century the proportion may have been as much as a third (McDowell 1979: 60–2).

The crisis of Irish representation In Protestant Ulster, where strong connections with the Presbyterian American settlers combined with sympathy with the complaint of ‘taxation without representation’, Protestant opinion was initially pro-American. However, the American alliance with the French in 1778 (and the capture of a British ship by the American privateer, Paul Jones, in Belfast Lough: Stewart 1993: xi–xii), combined with the dispersal of British troops in Ireland, exposed fears of a French invasion: ‘The Presbyterians had sympathised with the Americans, but they hated and feared the French’ (Beckett: 1966: 211). In May 1798, British spies reported that Napoleon’s fleet had left its port in Toulon for an unknown destination. Its target might well have been Ireland: Pitt started to plan for Union with two close colleagues, but did not yet tell most of his Cabinet (Jupp 2000). In fact the French fleet had sailed to Egypt, where it was routed by Nelson in August, but the threat level remained high. The Union was driven by security, not economics. The Act of Union with Scotland had contained numerous articles dealing with trading concessions, and the compensation due to Scotland for the acceptance of the English (and Welsh) national debt. The Act of Union with Ireland dealt with the

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subject in one Article (the seventh) containing no trading concessions, and a simple division of responsibility for the United Kingdom’s national debt. Most non-agricultural economic activity in Ireland was in the hands of Presbyterians or Quakers, and therefore not represented in Irish politics. It was impossible to fund the growing Irish national debt from inside Ireland. The basis of the Irish revenue reflected the monarchical basis of the Williamite succession in Ireland (rather than parliamentary basis, as in Scotland). The Irish administration was largely funded through taxes and duties which flowed automatically to the monarch (Johnston 1963: 96–7). These resources were insufficiently buoyant to cope with depression in the Irish economy (partly due to war with America), and between 1763 and 1773 the national debt almost doubled, approaching a million pounds (Beckett 1966: 206). A Dublin newspaper argued, in January 1775, that: ‘by the same authority which the British Parliament assumes to tax America, it may also and with equal justice presume to tax Ireland without the consent or concurrence of the Irish parliament’ (Beckett 1966: 206). Grattan hoped that the parliament would widen the popular basis of the Irish government, through the incorporation of the Catholic and Presbyterian middle classes. However, the legislature did not follow his reformist programme. The war with France and the threat of rebellion fed on one another (Cullen 1968: 180). The national debt rose dramatically throughout the 1790s, as revenues remained static (Table 3.8). To finance its debt, the Irish administration relied on the sale of government debentures to the public. Its success in maintaining payments without default had seen interest rates fall from 8 per cent in 1715 to 4.5 per cent in 1779. However, the failure to set a balanced budget in any year after 1770, and the increased expenditure associated with the rebellion, put new pressure on the system. The Irish banking system was in no position to finance such an expansion in government debt. A parliament of landowners gave little encouragement to banking. A Bank of Ireland was finally established in 1783 almost a century after the Bank of England, Bank of Scotland, and Royal Bank of Scotland, with Catholics contributing some 10 per cent of the total capital (Foster 1989: 205). However, the Bank still bore the imprint of the ascendancy parliament. Catholics and Quakers were debarred from the Directorate, discrimination which was ‘regarded by Irish Catholics as an extension of the penal laws, and were a source of constant embarrassment to the Bank’ (Hall 1949: 41). The Bank was too small to play a major role in financing the national debt. The government made a request for £300,000 in 1796, but was refused, and only given £150,000 in 1797 (Hall 1949: 64–5). The financial pressure on the government is shown in the interest rates paid on public loans in Britain and Ireland (McLean and McMillan 2005, their Table 3.7). Rates in

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Ireland rose from 5.0 per cent in 1793 to a high of 8.2 per cent in 1798, while in Britain, even under wartime stresses, the interest rate on government debt was only 6.34 per cent. This forced the Irish government to turn to the London market, where rates were lower and capacity higher, and from 1798 an increasing proportion of the Irish national debt was financed this way. The fact that rates fell (both in London and Dublin) as the Union proceeded suggests that it was greeted favourably by the financial markets. The chaos in Irish public finances may not have been a major concern of the non-executive Dublin parliament. However, it was a key consideration both in Dublin Castle (seat of the Irish government) and in London. At Westminster the interests of both the government party and the British commercial sector were much more closely bound in to the system of representation. The plan for Union drawn up by William Pitt and Lord Grenville in summer 1798 (Jupp 2000) and presented to his Cabinet in December after the defeat of a rebellion based in Country Wexford (Hague 2004: 436) was intended to be generous to the Irish, restricting exposure to the British national debt. Viscount Castlereagh wrote that ‘the terms are considered as highly liberal, the proportional arrangements of the expenses having completely overset the argument on which the enemies of the measure had hitherto principally relied, viz., the extension of English debt and taxation to Ireland’ (quoted in McCavery 2000: 355). Although the provisions for trade and the national debt were attacked by the opponents of the Union, particularly John Foster, and the demands for some protectionist measures for manufacturing conceded, the economic basis of the union was not a source of major division. Pitt was willing to buy a secure western frontier. Furthermore, the economic provisions of the Union, unlike Pitt’s commercial propositions, did not arouse the hostility of any significant political interest in Britain. Although protests from Yorkshire woollen manufacturers led to a demand for amendment of the economic article in the Act of Union in the House of Commons—providing ‘the only spark of excitement in England on the Union’—it was easily defeated (Bolton 1966: 201).

Pitt and constitutional reform Pitt himself was unusually secular for his era. But he was sensitive to religion as a badge of allegiance. He wrote in 1792 to the Lord Lieutenant: The idea of the present fermentation gradually bringing both [religious] parties [in Ireland] to think of a Union with this country has long been in my mind . . . I believe it, though itself not easy to be accomplished, to be the only solution for other and greater difficulties.

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The admission of the Catholics to the . . . suffrage could not then be dangerous. The Protestant interest—in point of power, property, and Church establishment—would be secure, because the decided majority of the supreme Legislature would necessarily be Protestant; and the great ground of argument on the part of the Catholics would be done away, as, compared with the rest of the Empire, they would become a minority. (Pitt to Earl of Westmorland, 1792, quoted by Hague 2004: 435)

Except for its failure to discriminate between the two streams of Irish Protestantism, this cannot be faulted. Giving Catholics civil rights would remove their constitutional grievance. Bringing Ireland into the Union would protect Protestant interests better than the continuation of an Irish Parliament, because Catholics would always be in a minority in the Union parliament. To achieve Union on his terms, however, Pitt needed to convince three parties: the British and Irish Parliaments, and the King. This forced him to disguise his motives: To attach Catholic emancipation to the Union would have meant that it would not have passed through the House of Lords in Dublin, and such a measure might have struggled in the Lords in Westminster, although Pitt totally dominated the Commons there. However, his plans were defeated by a royal trump card.

The passage of the union By the late 1790s, Fox and Grattan had absented themselves from the Westminster and Dublin Parliaments, removing the focus for any legislative opposition. The core of the Dublin Castle government: the lord lieutenant, Lord (Charles) Cornwallis, and chief secretary, Viscount Castlereagh (Robert Stewart), wanted parliamentary union accompanied by Catholic emancipation. However, Lord Clare, the leader of the Irish House of Lords, was an ardent supporter of a legislative union but would not countenance further concessions to the Catholics, whilst John Foster, the speaker of the Irish House of Commons, opposed the government on both counts. Irish politicians divided in two dimensions on the Union (Table 3.9). A politician’s stance on the Union was not correlated with his stance on Catholic emancipation. There were significant players in each of the four groupings of Table 3.9. This meant that both the pro- and the anti-Union coalitions were fragile. As in Scotland, the last Irish Parliament could vote first against Union and then for it without paradox. The debate about whether to include Catholic emancipation along with Parliamentary Union caused ructions within the Dublin administration, with William Elliot, the under secretary to the military department, threatening to

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resign his position. However, the debate also shows the consideration which was given to Lord Clare, as leader of the House of Lords in Dublin. In a bicameral parliament, he had a significant influence over one of the blocking options against Union. Gaining Clare’s conformity was deemed important enough to induce the Unionists to stop talking in public about Catholic emancipation. However, Foster saw his role in upholding the authority of Grattan’s Parliament, and was not to be persuaded to support its abolition, especially by such a ‘damn silly fellow’ as Cornwallis (Geoghegan 1999: 43). This is an interesting contrast with the unicameral Scottish Parliament, in which the influence of the Lords was incorporated with that of the Commons. Whilst the majority of the Lords were in favour of a parliamentary union, the Irish case highlights a special interest given to the leader of the Lords, who controlled a veto player in the union game.

The Irish House of Commons and the Act of Union How could the Irish Parliament, which had gained its extended powers only in 1782, be persuaded to vote itself out of existence in 1800, having refused to in 1799? To answer this, we repeated, as far as the data permitted, the analysis of vote switching that was offered for the 1706 Scottish Parliament earlier (McLean and McMillan 2005, their Tables 3.8 to 3.10). Our analysis of the flow of votes suggests that the government succeeded in its attempts to stop the issue of Catholic rights and representation polarizing the political situation in such a way as to favour the opponents of Union. Secondly, it indicates that there was a core of the pro-Union support, comprising some one-third of the MPs who voted on each of the issues, within the Irish House of Commons who had been opposed to concessions directed at the Catholic population. Whilst supporting the administration’s view that the two issues should be treated separately, it suggests that if the intention of Pitt and Cornwallis to treat Union and Catholic emancipation as dual strategies for Irish constitutional reform had been made explicit, then greater opposition could have been expected. After the defeat of the Union measures in 1799 the government offered compensation for those borough constituencies which were to be abolished in the event of a legislative union, as the parliamentary representation of the Irish was rationalized and reduced. The original scheme planned by Pitt and Grenville was based on 150 Irish members in the Westminster House of Commons, but this total was reduced to 100 by the time that the proposals for Union were announced. Even this figure was too large for some. Lord Sheffield worried that ‘I do not think that any of our country gentlemen

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would venture into parliament if they were to meet 100 Paddies’ (quoted in Geoghegan 2003: 130). The provision for borough compensation may have persuaded of the patrons of the borough constituencies to support the government, but evidence in terms of the shifting of the vote is limited. Of the ten members from borough constituencies recorded as having switched from the anti-Union to pro-Union positions between 1799 and 1800, six came from boroughs which were due to be abolished, and hence receive compensation, and four from boroughs which were to retain their representation. Since threequarters of the borough seats were to be abolished, this proportion is relatively low. Of the borough MPs who abstained in 1799 and then voted in 1800, the proportion voting in favour of Union from seats to be abolished (twenty-five members, out of thirty-four supporters of the Union, or 73.5 per cent) was very similar to those from seats to be abolished voting against the Union (seventeen out of twenty-four opponents, or 70.8 per cent). This suggests that the direct effect of the offer of borough compensation was extremely marginal. Whereas the Scottish Union involved little change in the basis of the representation, the Irish Union changed the basis of representation towards a more popular mode of election. The seats abolished were the rottenest boroughs (all Scottish burghs were basically rotten). Given that religious discrimination in the choice of electorate had been removed in 1793, this gave the Catholics a certain leverage in county constituencies (although their influence could still be constrained in borough constituencies). The plan for Union focused on the size of Irish representation in a united Westminster Parliament; there was no challenge to the assumption that the greatest reduction in the number of Irish legislators would be through the abolition of the rottenest boroughs. Table 3.8 Irish national debt, 1794–1801. Year ending 25 March 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801* *9 months to 5 January. Source: Hall (1949: 63).

£ 2,874,267 4,002,452 4,477,098 6,537,467 10,134,675 15,806,824 23,100,785 28,541,157

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Table 3.9 The bi-dimensionality of Irish politicians’ attitudes, c. 1799. Catholic emancipation

For

For Cornwallis. ‘Both will help public order’

Against Clare. ‘Union will preserve Ascendancy’

Grattan. ‘Preserve independence of country Whigs from government’

Foster. ‘Union will break Ascendancy’

Union Against

My pre´cis of politicians’ positions, from ODNB online; Cullen (2000: 222). ‘The alliance against Union was one of reckless elements on both sides, an improbable combination of a confederacy of Whigs under the leadership of Grattan, Ponsonby and others who had self-destructed in 1797, and of a hard-line group of loyalists such as Foster and Downshire who put the domestic circumstances of Irish protestants ahead of either conciliation of rebels or the interests of Britain’.

King George says no The Union was thus needed, in Pitt’s view, for four linked reasons: to secure Britain’s western frontier during the French wars; to overcome the crisis of public finance, especially in Ireland but also in Britain; to reap the gains of free trade; and to increase the legitimacy of the British state in Ireland. The Union of 1800 reconciled the Presbyterians. It failed to reconcile the Catholics. A group of politicians less far-sighted than Pitt fatally damaged it. Pitt dominated the Commons but not the Lords. Most of his own Cabinet were in the Lords. Some of them rejected the idea of any concessions to Catholics. They leaked Pitt’s plan to its most obdurate opponent, the temporarily sane King George III. The king had long given clear signals of his opposition to Catholic emancipation, which he described as ‘beyond the decision of any Cabinet of ministers’. In September 1800, Pitt called his Lord Chancellor, Lord Loughborough, to a Cabinet meeting to discuss ‘the great question on the general state of the Catholics’ (both quoted in Hague 2004: 465). Loughborough was on holiday in Weymouth with the king, and promptly showed him this letter. The king exploded, in public, saying to Pitt’s closest ally Henry Dundas in the hearing of the Irish Secretary Lord Camden: What is the Question which you are all about to force upon me? What is this Catholic Emancipation . . . that you are going to throw at my Head. . . . ? I will tell you, that I shall look on every Man as my personal Enemy, who proposes that Question to me . . . I hope All my Friends will not desert me. (George III’s words at a levee, 28.01.01, as recalled by Camden in 1804, quoted by Hague 2004: 468)

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The king thought that concessions to Catholicism were inconsistent with the coronation oath that the 1689–1707 settlement required him to take. This royal indignation over Ireland was to be repeated by some of his successors, for instance when Queen Victoria attempted to block Gladstone from the Prime Ministership in 1892, and when George V seemed more disposed to listen to His Majesty’s Opposition than to His Majesty’s Government in 1912–14 over Irish Home Rule. Pitt responded with a magnificent memorandum (quoted by Hague 2004: 470–1), as did George V’s Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, equally magnificently, in the same circumstances in 1913 (Appendix to Chapter 12). Each prime minister pointed out that he must resign if the king maintained his attitude. In 1913 this was sufficient to persuade the king and his advisers to back down. In 1801 it was not. The king vetoed Catholic emancipation, and Pitt resigned in February 1801. The king had made Pitt’s position totally impossible. His action ensured that the Union with Ireland was illegitimate in the eyes of the majority of the Irish population from the outset. Catholic Emancipation came in 1829 with great rancour, but proved inadequate to save Ireland for the Union. The king’s veto in 1801 was the first great tragedy of Union. The failure of the unelected parts of the British government to accept Irish Home Rule from 1893 to 1914 was to be the second.

4 Why Should We Be Beggars with the Ballot in Our Hand? Iain McLean and Jennifer Nou

This and the following three chapters consider the next existential crisis of Union, a century after George III’s veto. As in 1801, the unelected parts of Parliament vetoed policies that had won the majority votes in the elected part, the House of Commons. Parliament was and is ‘in the mouths of lawyers’, as Dicey 1885/1915: 37–8) insists, a tricameral legislature. The three houses are the monarch, the Lords, and the Commons. The first two of these are unelected. They were both dominated for long periods by supporters of one party. When the opposite party formed a majority government, therefore, there was potential for conflict between the chambers. The British Constitution has no established procedure for handling such conflict: for instance, no provision for a conference between the houses; no procedure for a special majority to override a veto. Better-thought-through constitutions such as that of the United States have written procedures for conflicts among the chambers. The President is (in the mouths of political scientists) a chamber of the US legislature, and the Constitution specifies when he may veto legislation and when and how his veto may be overridden. That is why the constitutional crisis of 1909–14, to be described now, remains vital for the understanding of the weakness of the British Constitution. A Liberal campaign song for the January 1910 General Election, to be sung to the tune ‘Marching through Georgia’, sets the scene. It is a good tune, though the Liberals who borrowed it probably did not know that General Sherman’s march through Georgia in 1864 was as murderous for some as it was liberating for others. Sound the call for freedom, boys, and sound it far and wide, March along to victory for God is on our side, While the voice of Nature thunders o’er the rising tide, ‘God gave the land to the people!’

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Chorus The land, the land, ’twas God who made the land, The land, the land, the ground on which we stand, Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand? God made the land for the people. Hark, the sound is spreading from the East and from the West, Why should we work hard and let the landlords take the best? Make them pay their taxes on the land just like the rest, The land was meant for the people. Chorus Clear the way for liberty, the land must all be free, Liberals will not falter from the fight, tho’ stern it be, ’Til the flag we love so well will fly from sea to sea O’er the land that is free for the people. Chorus The army now is marching on, the battle to begin. The standard now is raised on high to face the battle din, We’ll never cease from fighting ’til victory we win, And the land is free for the people. Chorus (This version from http://www.liberator.org.uk/article.asp?id¼22403892, accessed 04.05.2005.)

This chapter and the next describe the successful obstruction of the elected Liberal governments of the United Kingdom by the unelected House of Lords and the unelected kings Edward VII and George V, between 1906 and 1914. In this chapter, we examine Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George’s attempt to introduce land value taxation and the factors which led to its demise. In the next, we examine the Unionist coup d’e´tat over Ireland. Normally, the United Kingdom is a paradigm case of a low-n veto-player regime, which should mean (but in this case did not) that the elected government gets its way. Lloyd George introduced land value taxation in the UK Budget of 1909, but the land taxes then introduced yielded a trivial amount of revenue. Lloyd George’s attempt to broaden the land tax base and increase its yield, in the 1914 Budget, also failed. We consider three possible explanations of this failure, namely incompetence, impracticability, and veto plays. We argue that the third of these is the most parsimonious—it explains the most with the least. The concepts of ‘veto players’ and ‘veto games’ were introduced in Chapter 2. Tsebelis (1995, 2002) claims that they come in two varieties: institutional and partisan. An institutional veto player is one who has the

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legal power to block such proposals. Such a player may be an individual (the US President) or a chamber (the UK House of Lords). And the veto may be unconditional (the US President’s at the end of a session of Congress, when there is no time to override it; the House of Lords on all non-monetary matters before 1911). Or it may be conditional (the US President when his veto may be overridden; the House of Lords since 1911, when it remains a veto player on non-monetary matters in the last year of a parliament but not otherwise; however, its powers of delay remain politically significant). A partisan veto player is a party (or other) group that may block a proposal so long as the group coheres. A governing party with over half of the seats in a chamber is a unique partisan veto player over all proposals that are carried if a simple majority votes for it. More than one party may be a veto player in a chamber where no party holds half the seats, or where more than a simple majority of those present is required to pass a measure. The status quo is stable if it is relatively hard to upset. The more veto players there are in a political system, or the larger the qualified majority required for a proposal to pass, the more stable is the status quo. Equivalently, as either the number of veto players or the qualified majority threshold rises, the win set of the status quo diminishes, and the core, or the uncovered set of the game, gets bigger. Recent extensions of the Tsebelis framework due to Persson and Tabellini (2002, 2005), Hallerberg (2004), Hallerberg and Maier (2004) and others draw substantive implications for fiscal policy from regime structure, and in particular from the number of veto players. Persson and Tabellini argue that proportional and majoritarian regimes differ systematically. Both deductively and by cross-sectional statistical analysis of data from 85 democracies (as classed by the well-known Freedom House indices—latest at: http:// www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/FIWAllScores.xls), they show that majoritarian regimes are more fiscally responsible than proportional regimes; whereas proportional regimes spend more on redistributive welfare payments than do majoritarian regimes. They may overstate their case, as they have not proved the direction of causation. It could be that a regime whose citizens value consensus, public services, and social insurance relatively highly also values, and chooses, a proportional electoral system; and the 85 countries span a wide range of continents and GDP per head levels. The idea behind this work is that a proportional regime must involve a larger, and more stable, ruling coalition than a majoritarian regime. Therefore, more clients (veto players) have to be satisfied for this stability to continue. However, veto players can make an unexpected appearance in a majoritarian regime. In a Tsebelian framework, the United Kingdom is a

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paradigm low-n veto-player regime. We should expect it to be a regime with high fiscal discipline. Six features of its modern constitution, familiar to all beginning political science students of the United Kingdom, combine to produce this by ensuring that normally there is no veto player apart from the governing party and its ministers. They are:  Sovereignty of Parliament. As classically enunciated by Dicey in 1885: Parliament means, in the mouth of a lawyer, . . . the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons; these three bodies acting together . . . constitute Parliament. (Dicey 1885/1915: 37–8)

 The simple-majority single-ballot system favours the two-party system (Duverger 1954: 217). This is what W. H. Riker renamed ‘Duverger’s Law’, distinguishing it from Duverger’s hypothesis that proportional representation tended to favour multipartyism. The Hypothesis is falsifiable, and in some circumstances false. The Law is securely grounded, providing that its antecedent conditions are correctly stated. In accordance with Duverger’s Law, if local and regional parties are set aside, nationwide competition for votes under the United Kingdom’s plurality electoral system will generally produce a single-party majority in the Commons, and hence no rival partisan veto players there. However, local and regional parties cannot be set aside. In particular, the problem of aggregating from two-partyism in each constituency to two-partyism in a country as a whole is complex (Cox 1997: 23–8; Chhibber and Kollman 2004). Where (as in Britain in 1910) there is a powerful regional party (the Irish Party), two-party competition in each constituency is consistent with a three-party system in the House of Commons.  Upper house unelected, and does not obstruct government programme. The House of Lords is entirely unelected. Until 1958, when provision was first made for life peerages, membership was only by inheritance of a peerage, or by becoming a senior bishop or law lord. The convention that the Lords does not obstruct the manifesto measures of a government with a Commons majority was codified in 1945 as the ‘Salisbury–Addison convention’, after the Conservative and Labour leaders in the Lords at that time. Salisbury–Addison is discussed in depth in Chapter 12. Before 1945, the Conservatives, who had controlled the Lords since the time of Pitt the Younger, often vetoed non-financial legislation of Liberal governments.  Civil service code: loyalty is to ministers. The modern civil service emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Under the celebrated Northcote–Trevelyan reforms of the 1850s, entry was by merit in a competitive examination, and promotion was due to ability, not to patronage.

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? However, the loyalty of civil servants is to their ministers and the government of the day. If the government changes political complexion, the loyalty of civil servants transfers to the new administration. There are only a trivial number of political appointees in the UK administration (currently restricted to two special advisers per Secretary of State, with a slightly larger number for the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer). These political appointees are not on civil service contracts, and are not supposed to give orders to permanent civil servants.  House of Commons control over finance. Since King Charles I was forced to call Parliament in 1640 to vote supply for his war against the Scots who had rebelled against his religious policies, it has been accepted that ‘supply’— that is, voting for public expenditure and for the taxes to pay for it—was uniquely the function of the lower house of Parliament. The framers of the US Constitution, who were close students of British parliamentary procedure, carried this view over there (US Constitution Art. I: 7).  Monarchy purely ornamental. Nothing is more basic to the unwritten constitution than that the monarch never vetoes legislation. As the children’s section of the UK Parliament web site states: The Royal Assent is the Monarch’s agreement to make a Bill into an Act of Parliament. The Monarch actually has the right to refuse Royal Assent but nowadays this does not happen—the Royal Assent is a formality. The last time that the Royal Assent was refused was in 1708, when Queen Anne refused her Assent to a Bill for settling the Militia in Scotland (http:// services.parliament.uk/education/online-resources/Glossary/Glossary.aspx? letter¼r, accessed 26 March 2009).

In the following sections we show that during the years 1909–14 all six of these foundational assumptions about the British Constitution were violated. So far as we know, these are the only years in British history for which this is true. One would expect extensive political–scientific analysis of this phenomenon; but we have found almost none. It is of methodological importance because of veto games. It is of normative importance because the elected parts of government were stymied by the unelected parts. And it illustrates the effect of changes in the veto-player structure. THE RISE AND FALL OF LAND VA LUE TAX AT I ON 1 90 9 – 2 0 Sovereignty of Parliament undermined. According to Diceyan constitutional theory of the last section, the United Kingdom is the paradigm low-veto-player

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regime, that is, Parliament is sovereign, and has the right to make or unmake any law whatsoever. However, in the three Parliaments elected at the General Elections of 1906, January 1910, and December 1910, the King-in-Parliament comprised two warring factions. In the policy areas where they were at war, each faction could veto laws; neither could make or unmake (i.e. repeal) them. The 1906 General Election returned a strong Liberal majority in seats (Table 5.1). The Liberal Party held almost 60 per cent of the seats in the Commons. With the Labour and Irish Parties, it formed what contemporaries sometimes called the ‘progressive forces’—jointly controlling over 75 per cent of the seats. However, it did not need their votes and therefore did not always promote their causes. The Liberals’ Commons hegemony arose in part from the responsiveness of the system (showing Duverger’s Law at work) and in part from an electoral bias in their favour, and still more in favour of the Irish Party. Both 1910 General Elections were forced—the first by the House of Lords when they rejected the Budget of 1909, the second by King George V when he refused to create sufficient peers to enact the Parliament Bill without a second general election. These simple facts show that institutional veto players matter. No longer single party majority. The results of the two 1910 elections were the same in aggregate, although there was much churning of individual seats. There was no longer a single-party majority. The Irish Party had become a partisan veto player in the Commons. The minimum-size winning coalition was Liberal + Irish. An alternative minimum winning coalition was Liberal + Conservative. The Labour Party remained a dummy: as in the 1906 Parliament it could neither make nor unmake any winning coalition. Upper House of Parliament obstruction of government programme. In the 1906 Parliament, Lord Salisbury had gone and the Salisbury–Addison convention did not yet apply. Therefore, the House of Lords was free to operate as a selective institutional veto player. Most notably, it did not obstruct the Trade Disputes Act 1906. This was a Labour measure, adopted by Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman when he abandoned his own ministers’ bill in favour of a Labour one. By giving trade unions widespread legal immunities from tort actions, it readjusted property rights more radically, probably, than any preceding bill. However, the Lords did block numerous measures relating to the old centre–periphery political cleavage on such matters as school education, liquor licensing, and disestablishment of the minority Anglican Church of Wales. The Welsh nonconformist David Lloyd George, appointed

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Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1908, explained the situation in the following Cabinet memorandum during the preparation of his Budget for 1909: The two objects sought . . . are: (1) To obtain a valuation of land in the United Kingdom, and (2) To raise a revenue which in the coming financial year would reach 500,000l., and which would afterwards gradually increase until it would produce something much more substantial. It is now clear that it would be impossible to secure the passage of a separate Valuation bill during the existence of the present Parliament, owing to the opposition of the Lords, and therefore the only possible chance which the Government have of redeeming their pledges in this respect is by incorporating proposals involving land valuation in a finance bill. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that proposals for valuing land which do not form part of a provision for raising revenue in the financial year for which the Budget is introduced would probably be regarded as being outside the proper limits of a Finance Bill by the Speaker of the House of Commons.1

This is a particularly clear statement of the vetoes that Lloyd George must sidestep: one from the House of Lords, and one from the Speaker of the House of Commons. The former would veto any separate real-estate valuation bill, the latter would veto any such bill incorporated into a budget unless the budget also implemented any resulting land value taxes immediately. Lloyd George went on to state that he had confirmed with the Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Courtenay Ilbert, that the Speaker would indeed veto a valuation provision in the budget if unaccompanied by a projected yield. The Budget of 1909 was thus moulded from the outset by veto games. Its main thrust was to expand the United Kingdom’s tax base to pay for two classes of public expenditure that were expected to grow fast, namely, defence and social security. Defence spending was growing fast because of a naval arms race which the opposition Unionists were loudly demanding. Social security spending could be expected to grow fast because of the first provisions for state old age pensions, in the 1908 Budget. These could in turn be explained by the shift of the median voter to one lower in the income distribution after the franchise extension of 1884. Civil servants not entirely loyal to ministers. Its resistance was encouraged by Lloyd George’s most senior official, the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir George Murray: The Government seem to me to be going straight on the rocks financially (and perhaps otherwise), and nobody will listen to me when I tell them so . . . I cannot believe that your House will swallow the Budget if the mature infant turns out to be anything like the embryo which I now contemplate daily with horror.2

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So wrote Sir George to Lord Rosebery, whose private secretary he had once been. Rosebery was a former Liberal Prime Minister who felt himself stranded by the leftward movement of his former party. By 1909, he sat in the Lords as a cross-bencher. As the constitutional crisis grew, he was increasingly spoken of as a potential caretaker non-party Prime Minister. Although Murray later drew back from his encouragement to Rosebery to reject the Budget, his place was taken—for exactly opposite reasons—by his political master. As noted above, Lloyd George initially aimed to circumvent, not provoke, the House of Lords. But as talk of rejecting the Budget on behalf of the class interests of land grew, Lloyd George turned on the dukes in order to enrage them still further: Should 500 men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgment—the deliberate judgment—of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country? . . . [W]ho ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth[?] (Speech at Newcastle upon Tyne, 09.10.09, quoted by Jenkins 1968: 94)

The King’s secretary, Lord Knollys, requested Prime Minister H. H. Asquith ‘not to pretend to the King that he liked Mr Lloyd George’s speeches, for the King would not believe it, and it only irritated him’ (Jenkins 1968: 95). House of Commons control over finance undermined. The intention was to provoke the Lords to reject the Budget, which they duly did the following month. This forced a General Election which the trend of by-elections suggests would otherwise have been won by the Unionists. With the Budget passed in April 1910, the parliamentary timetable was preordained for three years. The first Government move was to introduce legislation to restrict the veto power of the Lords. The Parliament Bill was introduced in April 1910, but because of, first, the death of Edward VII in May 1910, and then the new king George V’s refusal to create the necessary new peers to force it through the House of Lords, it could not be enacted until after the Liberals and allies had won their third General Election in December 1910. It was enacted in August 1911. The Parliament Act 1911 confirms the pre-1909 understanding that the Lords may not amend a finance bill. It introduces the ‘suspensory veto’ that is still in force: a bill rejected by the Lords may nevertheless be enacted if the Commons pass it in three (since 1949 in two) successive sessions. Monarchy not purely ornamental. The Act required a further general election because George V insisted that he would not create the peers required to swamp the bill’s otherwise inevitable rejection in the Lords unless the Liberals and their allies won a further electoral mandate. He gave even that

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undertaking very grumpily and reluctantly. Knollys had falsely told the king that if he refused the undertaking (in which case the Asquith government would of course have resigned) the Unionist leader Balfour would refuse to take office. This had the effect of tricking the king into believing that he had no option. In fact, Balfour had signalled that he would take office in such a situation. By lying to his master, Knollys may have saved the British monarchy, but when George V found out the deception in 1913, he sacked Knollys (Jenkins 1968: 174–83; Bogdanor 1995: 116–19). If the king had followed his Unionist ideology, he would have intervened in politics on the side of the Unionists in summer 1910. He nearly did so on other occasions up to 1914. As detailed in Chapter 5, he was so angry with Irish Home Rule that he seriously contemplated either dismissing the Liberal government or vetoing the Home Rule Bill. Any of these vetoes would have raised the constitutional crisis to a higher level. By acting as a political partisan, the king would have undermined the standing of the monarchy. The threat of creation was sufficient to persuade the Lords to enact the Parliament Bill in August 1911. The swamping of the Lords with Liberal peers was not required, so no Lord Baden-Powell, Lord Thomas Hardy, nor Lord Bertrand Russell were then created.3 Thereupon, the partisan veto player the Irish Party was in a position to demand that Home Rule for Ireland should occupy essentially the whole Parliamentary timetable until 1914. The Government of Ireland Bill was bound to be (and was) rejected twice by the Lords without serious discussion or amendment. Therefore, it could not be enacted until 1914, by which time Ulster Protestants had created a private army to resist it with the connivance and perhaps the financial support of the Leader of His Majesty’s loyal Opposition, Rt. Hon. Andrew Bonar Law. His Majesty himself was more loyal to his Opposition than to his Government. The Irish crisis is analysed in Chapter 5. For this and other reasons, Chancellor Lloyd George was unable to return to the subject of land taxation until his Budget of 1914. By this time, in Avner Offer’s words (1981: 368–9), ‘two celebrated cases’ in the courts had ‘developed into serious reversals’ for the 1910 land tax legislation: the more serious of the two emasculated Undeveloped Land Duty, the most productive (and most economically sound) of the land taxes. By the time Lloyd George introduced the 1914 Budget, the land valuation register enacted in 1910 was still incomplete. Treasury (as in 1909) and Inland Revenue (unlike in 1909) senior officials were unhelpful to their Chancellor. And the Liberals no longer held a single-party majority in the Commons. Lloyd George was now vulnerable to a revolt of landowning MPs in his own party. The revolt forced him to withdraw his site value rating proposals in June (Gilbert 1978; Offer 1981: 396–9). Within the month, Archduke Franz

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Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo. An all-party coalition government was created in 1915, to be succeeded by a coalition between the Conservatives and a fraction of the Liberals under Lloyd George when war ended in 1918. In the wartime coalition, partisan domestic politics were muted; in the 1918 coalition, Prime Minister Lloyd George held relatively few seats and the Conservatives on their own held a majority. Unsurprisingly, all the 1909 and 1914 land taxation provisions had been repealed by 1920.

TWO EXP LANATIONS Up to a point, the failure of land value taxation can be significantly explained by either individual missteps on the part of Lloyd George or the sheer impracticability of land taxes given the difficulties in site valuation. But Lloyd George and the Government also fell victim to veto plays. Lloyd George was careless of details and made grand promises on the hoof. The grand promises were often electorally shrewd (not only in 1909–10 but also with his introduction of National Insurance in 1911) and accompanied by radical rhetoric. His officials either loved him or hated him. Murray began by loving him in a condescending way: I am leading quite a happy life with my Welsh Goat [this may be the earliest reference to Lloyd George as ‘the Goat’], who feeds happily enough out of my hand at present. But I fear he will soon want something more stimulating . . . In his present humour he is a most engaging creature, full of graceful antics and the most unpractical notions. (Murray to Rosebery, 31.05.08, Rosebery MSS, National Library of Scotland, NLS MS 10049)

But he soon came to despise his Chancellor. For the 1909 Budget, therefore, Lloyd George relied on Sir Robert Chalmers, the chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. Chalmers was as much an ideologue as Murray, but on the other side. When the Lords rejected the Budget, he was overheard saying ‘I would like to festoon this room with their entrails’ (Murray 1980: 80; see also Braithwaite 1957: 68). However, by 1913, Lloyd George’s informality had alienated Chalmers too. He temporarily left the Treasury. This made Lloyd George more dependent on Edgar Harper, a land value taxation enthusiast whom Lloyd George had brought in from outside the Civil Service. This he was to repeat as a minister during the First World War, when he declared he wanted ‘men of push and go’, but with Harper he failed. Harper was a convinced land-taxer—a self-taught disciple of the American tax reformer Henry George (George 1882/1911).

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Harper told the Royal Commission on Local Taxation that it was straightforward to value land separately from the houses that stood on it. That was the key technical issue, as it would be with any attempt to restore land value taxation in the United Kingdom or any other regime today. The fundamental Georgeite—which is originally Ricardian—argument for the taxation of economic rent makes an intellectually impeccable case for land value taxation. The problems all lie in the implementation. In a 1908 Cabinet memorandum, Harper accurately pinpointed the key issue as being how to ‘obtain substantial revenue from land which now escapes, wholly or partially, its share of existing burdens’—the main such category being (then as now) ‘ripening building land’—in other words, land in transition from an earlier low-value use to the high-value use as housing land (Offer 1981: 245; ‘Memorandum by Mr Edgar Harper on the Imposition of a National Tax on Land Values’, 05.12.08, CAB 37/96 # 161). But neither he nor anybody else found a reliable way to value it for taxation. In Offer’s withering summary (1981: 396–7), ‘Valuation had turned out to be a white elephant, unsuitable for burden and bogged down in legal quicksands. Most of the blame lay with Harper. He had preached the project for many years, and was allowed, indeed, called in, to show his prowess . . . In retrospect Harper blamed everyone but himself.’ Incompetence and impracticality are thus part of the story. But over the introduction of National Insurance in 1911, Lloyd George behaved in exactly the same way and yet the scheme, which changed property rights but did not particularly attack the landed interest, got going successfully (Braithwaite 1957). It is not even sufficient (although it is necessary) to observe that the representatives of the landed interest (who always included the median member of the House of Lords, succession to which is usually synonymous with inheritance of land) had always been a veto player in British politics. In earlier crises, UK governments had shown that they could sideline landed interests when it really mattered for public order: for example, in a succession of Irish land acts in 1870, 1881, and 1903; and in the Crofters’ Act 1886, which successfully headed off a Scottish Highland land agitation on Irish lines (McLean and McMillan 2005: 117–18, 222). All four of these Acts changed property rights to the benefit of tenants and the detriment of landowners. It might be argued that landowners in the periphery of the United Kingdom were marginal among landowners, but this is not so: they included Scottish dukes, and members of the Lords with large Irish interests such as the leading Unionist peers Lords Lansdowne and Midleton. However, in the 1903 Act, the landowners were generously compensated for the loss of their land. Prime Minister A. J. Balfour said that ‘there is no measure with which I am more proud to have been connected’. By analysing the take-up of the loan stock that financed the deal, Offer argues that the cost of both the creation of the Irish

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peasantry and the compensation of their former landlords fell ‘almost entirely [on] the shillings of British artisans’.4 What, then, made the veto power of the landed interest over land taxation so complete between 1906 and 1914, when it was not earlier or later? As hinted above, it was the fact that all seven elements of the Diceyan constitution were suspended at the same time: a suspension in which that fervent Unionist ideologue Professor Dicey took an active part, as we detail in the next two chapters. In some cases the suspension was obvious to everybody at the time it happened. Nobody had challenged Commons supremacy over finance since the English Civil War of 1640–9, which was in large part fought over this issue. The Lords’ challenge of 1909 was therefore revolutionary: The debate in the Lords began on November 23 [1909] . . . [A]s is so often the case when the House of Lords is engaged in reaching a peculiarly silly decision, there were many comments on the high level of the debate and on the enhancement it gave to the deliberative quality of the chamber. (Jenkins 1968: 100–1)

It could only have been sustained if the Unionists had won the January 1910 election: but their rejection of the Budget was sufficient to ensure, as Lloyd George saw but they did not, that they would not win that election. In other cases, the veto plays were known to political elites but not to the general public. This is particularly true of the royal veto threats between 1909 (by Edward VII) and 1913 (by George V over Ireland). Both kings signalled their reluctance to create peers in order to enact the programme of the elected government. That reluctance played a role in the first forced election and single-handedly caused the second. If either election had resulted in a Unionist victory, the royal veto would have been both effective and partisan. It is hardly surprising that monarchs of the era preferred the Unionists to the Liberals. The Unionists stood for land, church, and empire, all of them institutions in which the monarch had a material stake. Neither Edward VII nor George V was as shrill as their mother (grandmother) Victoria, whose passionate hatred of Gladstone, and naked attempts to manipulate in favour of Disraeli and then Salisbury, burst out in various undignified ways from 1874 onwards. But she was shielded, most notably by Gladstone himself, from the constitutional consequences of her partisanship. The stakes were higher from 1909 onwards. Pervasive unionism took control of many other public servants. Sir George Murray’s behaviour was an extraordinary breach of civil service neutrality, but his case was not the most extreme. That honour goes to (Sir) Henry Wilson, successively commandant of the army Staff College and director of military

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operations in the War Office during this period. In the Ulster crisis he helped to organize the paramilitary resistance against the military operations for which he was himself responsible, for instance by informing the paramilitary UVF of the planned deployment of British troops (Chapter 5). The courts, too, were unusually activist in the cases mentioned above, that undermined the 1909 land valuation regime. Offer quotes the High Court judge who killed Undeveloped Land Duty in Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Smyth as saying artlessly in 1920, ‘It is very difficult sometimes to be sure that you have put yourself into a thoroughly impartial position between two disputants, one of your own class and one not of your class’.5 Finally, the norm (as opposed to the legal doctrine) of parliamentary sovereignty received such a blow, largely at the hands of Professor Dicey himself, that its survival is truly miraculous. In order to justify their revolution, the Unionists had to appeal to a higher authority than Parliament. They found one in the people. The Lords resolution rejecting the Budget was carefully framed: ‘that this House is not justified in giving its assent to the Bill until it has been submitted to the judgment of the country’ (Motion by Lord Lansdowne, 10.11.09, quoted by Jenkins 1968: 95). From this the Unionists proceeded to full-blown advocacy of a referendum on Home Rule. The fullest intellectual case for the referendum appears in the long preface to the eighth edition of Dicey’s Law of the Constitution, published in 1915. Here he commends it under the title of ‘the people’s veto’. He complains that the Parliament Act had nullified the ‘wisdom and experience of the House of Lords’ and that the referendum ‘would be strong enough to curb the absolutism of a party possessed of a parliamentary majority’. Given Dicey’s passionate opposition to Home Rule, it is not surprising that George V took up the theme, suggesting to Prime Minister Asquith in March 1914 ‘that the Home Rule Bill should be submitted to a Referendum especially now that the principle of this method was admitted for the Ulster counties to decide for or against exclusion’ (Dicey 1885/1915: xc-cv, quoted at xcii and xcvii; stress in original. George V quoted in Bogdanor 1995: 128). Unfortunately, this left the king and the Unionists in the position of demanding the referendum as a bulwark against Liberal or Irish tyranny, but never against Unionist or Conservative tyranny. Dicey’s argument that the Parliament Act changed everything was hopelessly one-sided, as Asquith pointed out in a muscular memorandum to George V on the constitutional position of the Sovereign: ‘When the two Houses are in agreement (as is always the case when there is a Conservative majority in the House of Commons), the Act is a dead letter’ (Appendix to Chapter 12). He turned out to be wrong about the War Crimes Act 1991 but right about the general trend.

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The elephant in the room was the Irish Party—the partisan veto player in the Parliaments of 1910–18. That party, although internally fissile, had totally dominated parliamentary representation in Ireland since the franchise extension of 1884. Its bloc of at least 80 seats gave it partisan veto power in the Parliaments of 1885–6, 1892–4, January–December 1910 and 1910–18. That is no disproof, but rather a confirmation, of Duverger’s Law. Understood properly, Duverger’s Law operates at district level, not at national level. In the Catholic five-sixths of Ireland (and the Scotland division of Liverpool), Duverger’s Law delivered such hegemony to the Irish Party that many of its seats were uncontested (hence the apparent, but not real, over-representation shown in Table 5.1). Given that, all the responsiveness of the plurality electoral system was insufficient to deliver a single-party Commons majority in these four Parliaments. The Unionists were determined that Ireland must remain in the Union; but they overlooked the fact that as long as it remained in the Union, it would send a disaffected bloc of 80 MPs determined to weaken the Union and in a position to insist on their programme in every hung parliament. Despite their three election victories, Liberal and Irish Party voters remained beggars with the ballot in their hands. Land value tax, the subject of this chapter, was but one of several policies vetoed or delayed, because they threatened the material interest of the landowning class. Thus, while the Lords’ victory over the 1909 Budget was Pyrrhic, their victory over land taxes was real. The conventional, ‘forward-marchish’ view of British political history holds, in caricature, that the bad guys won in 1909; the People then intervened and the good guys won in 1911, putting the bad guys back in their red-padded box. Actually, the Lords, and the landed interest that they represented, did better than that. We return to this in Chapter 7. Meanwhile, we turn to the even bigger upset of Ireland.

5 The Curious Incident of the Guns in the Night Time Iain McLean and Tom Lubbock

The Curragh ‘mutiny’ and Larne gunrunning of spring 1914, which are the subjects of this chapter, made the elected UK government’s Irish legislation unworkable. Some of the participants believed that the elected government was proposing a coup d’e´tat against Ulster Protestants. It would be truer to say that Ulster Protestants and their allies, who included the king and the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, mounted a successful coup d’e´tat against the elected government. Dicey (1885/1915: 179–80) wrote: Foreign observers of English manners . . . have been far more struck than have Englishmen themselves with the fact that England is a country governed, as is scarcely any other part of Europe, under the rule of law.

If (as usual in Dicey) ‘England’ is deemed to include Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, in 1914 this England was not under the rule of law. The Government of Ireland Act 1914 was enacted in September 1914 under the procedures laid down by the Parliament Act 1911. The Parliament Act was itself endorsed by the king, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. The 1914 Act was endorsed by the king and the House of Commons. It followed the correct procedures laid down by the 1911 Act for enactment without Lords’ endorsement. However, by the time of its enactment, a Unionist coup d’e´tat supported by the king had made it utterly unworkable and it was suspended as soon as it had been enacted. A. V. Dicey helped to plan the coup d’e´tat. Parliament is usually sovereign, but a more elaborate theory is required when it is not. Normatively, Diceyan parliamentary sovereignty dictates what constitutional actors (politicians, civil servants, judges, soldiers, kings, etc.) ought to do. But why? Is there something magical about the King-in-Parliament? For H. L. A. Hart (1961) a certificate of enactment by the King-in-Parliament

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provides a rule of recognition, whereby courts can judge whether such and such is valid law. For Major General Sir Charles Fergusson, discussed later, an officer ‘must stick to the first principle, obedience to the King and constituted authority. If one lets go of that principle, one is all at sea, and can argue oneself into anything’ (to his brother, 25.04.1914, in Beckett 1986: 340). By the rule of law, ‘every man, whatever be his rank or condition, is subject to the ordinary law of the realm and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals’ (Dicey 1885/1915, p. 189). This did not apply to Major General (later Field Marshal Sir) Henry Wilson nor to Major F. H. Crawford, to whom George V personally awarded a CBE at the state opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament in 1921 (McNeill 1922: 289). The Curragh ‘mutiny’1 and Larne gunrunning of spring 1914 jointly forced the elected UK government to suspend its laws. This chapter explains how and why this coup d’e´tat succeeded.

THE CURRAGH As noted in previous chapters, the UK General Election of December 1910 re-elected the Liberal administration of H. H. Asquith, which governed with the support of the Labour and Irish parties. The Liberals took all ministerial posts. Recall that both 1910 elections were forced on them by unelected veto players. In the Parliament of 1906–10 the Liberals on their own had a majority of seats, and need not have dissolved until the end of 1912. (The reduction of the maximum length of a Parliament from seven years to five was one of the provisions of the Parliament Act 1911.) However, the Lords’ rejection of the 1909 Budget had forced the January election; and George V’s refusal to create peers to enact the Parliament Bill without a third election forced the December election. It is important for what follows, therefore, to keep in mind that the governing alliance had won three consecutive General Elections. The ‘progressive alliance’, as contemporaries called it, of Liberals, Irish Party, and Labour, held a substantial majority, both in seats and in votes, in the elected house (Table 5.1). Their majority in votes would have been higher had not almost all seats in Catholic Ireland been uncontested, so hegemonic was the Irish Party there. Referring forward to Table 11.1, on by-election trends through the Parliament of December 1910, we see that the position remained stable throughout the life of the Parliament. As usual, the Opposition made gains in early by-elections; as (not quite so) usual, the Government pulled these losses back towards the end.

Table 5.1 Seats, votes, and proportionality: UK general elections 1906–10. Lib

Irish Nationalist

Con

Lab

Election

Vote share (%)

Seat share (%)

Vote share (%)

Seat share (%)

Vote share (%)

Seat share (%)

Vote share (%)

Seat share (%)

Prop/ality Index (Monroe)

Responsiveness

Bias to:

1906 1910J 1910D

48.98 43.03 43.82

59.70 41.04 40.60

43.05 46.75 46.26

23.43 40.75 40.60

0.62 1.90 2.52

12.39 12.24 12.54

5.86 7.58 7.10

4.48 5.97 6.27

61.37 80.91 81.33

1.35 0.96 0.97

L L L

Note: Monroe index adapted from B. L. Monroe, ‘Disproportionality and malapportionment’, Electoral Studies 1994, Eqn 15; responsiveness as between the two main parties only, the ratio of the gaining party’s seat share to its vote share; bias as between the two main parties only, the one which would hold more seats if they had an equal number of votes; ‘Con’ columns include Liberal Unionists. Sources: Summary statistics from F. W. S. Craig’s British Electoral Facts 1989 Tables 1.18 to 1.20.

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The two unelected houses—the Lords and the monarchy—were controlled by the opposition Unionists. As shown in the previous chapter, the Lords largely represented the landed interest, some of it in Ireland. Since 1885, the material interests of the land had been represented entirely by the Conservative and Unionist Party. Likewise those of the established Church of England. Its bishops had a vested interest in opposing the reduction of its privileges in Ireland and Wales, where it was in a small minority. They almost all voted against Home Rule and Welsh disestablishment. Both kings’ vetoes favoured the Unionists. If they had won either of the two forced General Elections, the programme of the government elected in 1906 would have been prematurely aborted. From 1910 to 1914, George V showed more sympathy to His Majesty’s Unionist Opposition than to His Majesty’s Liberal Government. The Irish Party was pivotal in both the 1910 Parliaments (Table 5.1). It could make or unmake any governing coalition. The standard power index to measure this is known as the ‘normalized Banzhaf ’ index (Felsenthal and Machover 1998, Chapter 3). This index measures the proportion of winning coalitions to which each party is crucial. A party is crucial to a coalition if adding it to a coalition turns the coalition from losing to winning, and removing it turns the coalition from winning to losing. The ‘seat share’ columns of Table 5.1 show that in this sense, the Liberals, Conservatives, and Irish Party had equal power in the Parliaments of January and December 1910. Each, therefore, has a Banzhaf index of 1/3. The Labour Party was a dummy—there was no coalition to which it was crucial. The Banzhaf index is a measure of a priori power. It treats all coalitions as equiprobable. A Liberal–Conservative or Conservative–Irish coalition is a priori as likely as a Liberal–Irish coalition. A Liberal–Conservative coalition was not out of the question. Chancellor Lloyd George had floated the idea in August 1910 but the Conservatives had turned it down. The ideologically closest pair of parties was the Liberals and the Irish. After being doublecrossed by Lord Salisbury in 1885 (McLean 2001a: 84–5), the Irish Party was highly unlikely to seek a coalition with the Conservatives, who had become in turn more and more committed to Ulster (and more generally Irish) Unionism. ‘If the GOM [Gladstone] goes for Home Rule, the Orange card would be the one to play,’ said Salisbury’s maverick Chancellor Randolph Churchill. And play it he did, as did the entire Conservative leadership. Therefore, once the Parliament Act was enacted, the Irish Party was now in a position to insist on its programme of Home Rule (devolution) for Ireland. Its priorities ranked equally with the Liberals’ (because their Banzhaf power

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was equal) and ahead of those of the weakest member of the alliance, the Labour Party. Furthermore, although bitterly resisted in both unelected chambers, it was common knowledge that Home Rule would require three parliamentary sessions and must therefore be started in 1912 to be sure of enactment before the 1915 General Election. It would, for sure, be enacted in 1914, provided that the king did not revive a veto last used in 1708 and that, as laid down in the Parliament Act, it was carried unaltered in three successive sessions of the Commons. This three-session timetable gave the Ulster Unionists plenty of time to mobilize. The Parliament Act required the Bill to be presented unaltered each year: this gave them a handy but specious opportunity to say that the government was not listening. Protestants in Ulster had campaigned since 1886 under the slogans ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’ and Randolph Churchill’s ‘Ulster will Fight and Ulster will be Right.’ In 1912, the Ulster Covenant, modelled on the seventeenth-century Scottish Covenants, pledged its signatories to ‘us[e] all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland’. The Covenant, and a parallel women’s declaration, attracted nearly half-a-million signatures (McNeill 1922: 124). A paramilitary organization, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), was raised. Any two Justices of the Peace (JPs) could authorize paramilitary drilling in their area, so long as ‘the object was to render citizens more efficient for the purpose of maintaining the constitution of the United Kingdom as now established and protecting their rights and liberties thereunder’ (Stewart 1967: 69). They were initially unarmed, but their leaders darkly threatened that ‘all means’ might in due course be ‘found necessary’. They merely echoed the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Bonar Law. Law, a Scots-Canadian Presbyterian, was the first non-Anglican and non-Englishman (with the possible exception of Disraeli) to lead the Conservative and Unionist Party when he unexpectedly became leader in 1911. In July 1912, Law made a set-piece speech at the Churchill family seat, Blenheim Palace, a location chosen to remind Unionists of Lord Randolph Churchill’s Orange card and his son Winston’s defection. Law described the Liberal government as ‘a Revolutionary Committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud’. This seems to imply as other Unionists did that the Parliament Act was in some sense fraudulent.2 He went on to say: I repeat now with a full sense of the responsibility which attaches to my position, that, in my opinion, if such an attempt [viz. to include Ulster within the scope of Home Rule] is made, I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to

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support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people. (Blake 1955: 130)

That seems crystal clear. In late 1913, Law considered using the Lords to block renewal of the Army (Annual) Act unless the government promised not to move against the Ulster paramilitaries. By tradition, going back to the English Revolution, a standing army could only continue in existence if annually approved by Parliament. To have held up the Army (Annual) Act would have been as revolutionary an act as the rejection of the 1909 Budget. It would have vetoed the Home Rule Bill. Scholars have long doubted the claim that army discipline depended on the annual Army Act (Fortescue 1914: 60; Strachan 1997: 47–51). However, the veto threat was credible because both sides believed it. Sir John Simon, the Attorney-General, circulated a Cabinet memo explaining that the Army (and Marines when not aboard Her Majesty’s ships) could only be disciplined under the Army (Annual) Act, whereas the Navy, and marines aboard ship, had a permanent discipline act. John Seely, the Secretary for War, initialled his copy of this memo on 11 March (Nuffield College, Oxford, Mottistone (J. E. B. Seely) MSS, Box 16). However, the plan was apparently too strong meat for some of Law’s own colleagues. Henry Wilson, the Director of Military Operations at the War Office, who was in closer contact with the insurgents than with his own superiors, initially opposed the move but came round to fervent support. But Law dropped it on 20 March, the day the Curragh revolt broke out (Blake 1955: 182; Wilson diary, Imperial War Museum HHW 1/23).3 The Army had both emotional and material interests in the Union and the Empire. The Curragh, Co. Kildare, in Ireland’s horse country, was the main cavalry base of the British Army. All the leading soldiers in the 1914 events at the Curragh, bar one, had served in the Boer War (1899–1902). Following the old slogan ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’, Irish Nationalist MPs had cheered Boer victories in the Commons. This was particularly galling for army officers, who largely believed that war against a virile rural Teutonic Protestant race was a mistake, but who felt bound (in 1902) not to criticize their political masters publicly (Surridge 1997). They, therefore, had reason to hate the Irish Party. Although constitutional theory paid lip service to the dual control of the army, senior officers in 1914 did not believe it. Under dual control, the soldier’s duty was to the Crown, but the government of the day was responsible for finance. However, books used in the Staff College revealed officers’ contempt for politicians. One of them, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, argued that the war (on both sides) went well when generals ran it, but badly when politicians ran it. The author of another, a History of the

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British Army, declared that he was ‘absolutely nauseated by their [politicians’] hollowness and cant’ (Strachan 1997: 4–6). Army officers, therefore, tended to hate all politicians, but anti-Unionist politicians more than Unionist ones. The second most senior serving officer involved in the Curragh was Henry Wilson.4 While Director of Military Operations at the War Office between 1910 and 1914, he did not disguise his contempt for the government he served; and passed on embarrassing information about government plans and potential army mutinies to Unionist politicians and the leaders of the UVF, including his next-door neighbour Sir Edward Carson. Efforts to arm the paramilitaries began in 1913. Sir William Bull MP was political secretary to Walter Long, who had been the Unionists’ Ireland spokesman. The gunrunning was a fiasco. Bull’s unreliable brother-in-law, to whom he had foolishly delegated it, reported: [The police] say they have us all smoked in their jargon but the Government are scratching what to do the whole thing was given away by a case of Rifles breaking in half either at the Hamburg Docks or here. In 48 hours every port (i.e. Custom officials) was warned. (Churchill College, Cambridge. Bull MSS, 4/8, Capt H. P. Budden to Bull, 16.06.1913)

The government’s inaction is indeed curious. In December 1913, however, they did prohibit the private import of arms to Ireland (Beckett 1986: 7). By then, intelligence reports told them that the Protestant paramilitaries numbered about 80,000, armed with about 4,000 rifles, 3,000 swords, and 400,000 ammunition rounds (Cabinet memo by Augustine Birrell, 05.03.1914, in Mottistone MSS Box 16). In early 1914, ministers decided to send military reinforcements to protect arms dumps around northern Ireland from paramilitary raids. The GOC (Ireland), Sir Arthur Paget, was summoned to London to be given those instructions. Some Unionists thought they were designed to incite the Ulster Volunteers to attack the military or police, in order that they could then be violently suppressed. Senior army officers were already worried that some officers might refuse to act against the Ulster Protestants. They, or Unionist politicians, had conveyed these anxieties or hopes to the king, who put them to Asquith (Appendix to Chapter 12). Paget asked the Secretary for War, John Seely, if he could permit officers domiciled in Ulster to ‘disappear’ for the duration of the operation. Seely had himself served in South Africa, and had complained to Joseph Chamberlain about being ordered to burn Boer farms. Chamberlain had replied, ‘All you soldiers are what we call pro-Boer’ (Surridge 1997). Therefore, Seely had reason to understand, if not to support, Army officers’ unwillingness to coerce the equally Protestant Ulstermen. He agreed to Paget’s request, but insisted that any other officer unwilling to obey orders must be dismissed.

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On 20 March 1914, Paget returned to Ireland. He issued his ultimatum with very short notice. Officers who could not claim the Ulster domicile exception must resign ‘and would be dismissed the service with loss of pensions. An answer must be given by 6 pm’ (Notes by Lieutenant Colonel I. G. Hogg on the events of 20–23 March 1914, in Beckett 1986: 114). Brigadier General Hubert Gough passed on the ultimatum to his officers in the Third Cavalry Brigade at the Curragh camp in Co. Kildare the same afternoon. About sixty officers, including Gough himself, announced that they would resign. Gough and his allies immediately alerted their Unionist political contacts in London, who learnt before government ministers did what was going on. The officer who did most to limit the fallout was Major General Sir Charles Fergusson, who commanded all the infantry forces in the northern half of Ireland—thus being junior to Paget but senior to Gough. Fergusson—the only army player in the story not to have served in South Africa—persuaded most of the would-be resigners he spoke to not to resign. He stressed soldiers’ duty to the king and the likely reaction of enemies of the Empire to news of mass resignations in the army. Gough was relieved of his command and summoned to London, where he parlayed with the Secretary of State. He made it clear to brother officers that, far from going in disgrace and under the shadow of court martial, he was going in search of written guarantees that the government would not coerce the Ulster Protestants (Major P. Howell [to C. Wigram, one of George V’s equerries], Curragh, 22.03.14, in Beckett 1986: 103). He got them. The Cabinet stated that the whole affair was a ‘misunderstanding’, but that ‘it is the duty of all soldiers to obey lawful commands’, including those for the protection of public property and the support of the civil power. Seely then, on his own disastrous initiative, added two ‘peccant paragraphs’,5 saying that the Government ‘have no intention whatever of . . . crush[ing] political opposition to the policy and principles of the Home Rule Bill’. Even this was not good enough for Gough, who had been coached and stiffened by Wilson. He demanded and got an assurance from Sir John French, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, that this meant that ‘the troops under our command will not be called upon to enforce the present Home Rule Bill on Ulster’. With this piece of paper he returned in triumph to the Curragh and his command. When Asquith discovered what Seely had done, he dismissed him, and French also resigned. Gough’s undertaking could not practicably be revoked.6

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Gough and his friends continued to brief Unionist politicians and journalists. The most remarkable briefer was Wilson. Dining with his neighbour Carson on 18 March, he agreed that ‘the Lords must amend the Army Annual Act’. The following day, Carson stormed theatrically out of the Commons, saying that ‘I go to my people.’ Talk of creating a Provisional Government in Ulster was (at the time) a bluff, but a well-informed bluff. Wilson had just told Carson that the Army Act veto play might protect his private army. He then kept the Unionists up do date with the Curragh developments as they happened and before ministers got to hear of them. A comparable act would have been for a British Army general to have let the Provisional IRA know the weaknesses in a forthcoming British offensive against them. On 21 March, Wilson briefed Bonar Law on Gough’s campaign, and produced a draft for Seely containing ‘what the army would agree to’. He, thus, controlled both Gough’s campaign (as a Unionist activist), and the government response to it (as Director of Military Operations). He told his diary that he was ‘more than ever determined to resign, but I cannot think of a really good way of doing it’. He never did; remaining in his official capacity a government adviser, and in his unofficial capacity an adviser to Gough, Bonar Law (whom he saw daily at the height of the crisis), and the Ulster paramilitaries at the same time. He urged Sir John French to persist with his resignation. ‘Sir John was charming to me and thanked me, etc’, and took Wilson’s advice. He later hesitated, but when he finally did resign, the non-resigning Wilson wrote: This is splendid. Rang up B.L. & told him & added that it was now his business to drive the wedge deep into the Cabinet by causing the down fall of Seely, Morley & Haldane. A good day’s work.7

The majority of army officers whose reactions have been recorded sided with Gough. A minority did not. The most eloquent was Fergusson, who may have saved the army through his efforts to dissuade officers from resigning, even as the Director of Military Operations in London was doing the opposite. For Fergusson, ‘all personal considerations invited me to do as Gough did’. However, ‘[w]ithout a united Army with strong discipline, nothing can save King and Country when the crisis comes. Therefore I will do nothing that will in any way weaken the discipline of the Army . . . I don’t blame Gough & Co. They acted up to their opinions, but I hold them to be absolutely deluded and wrong.’ For this he was roundly abused, not only by Goughite Unionists, but also by the king whose name he had used in order to save the British Army. A petulant series of messages from the king complained that he had known nothing of ‘his’ orders.8 The British Army’s effective strength was six infantry divisions plus one cavalry division. The king was not grateful, or even aware, that Fergusson had saved a seventh of his army from destruction.

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LARNE The Ulster Volunteers took Wilson’s advice not to raid the arms depots in Northern Ireland. However, it was in their interest not to reveal to the UK government whether or not they were bluffing. Thanks to Wilson, the Protestant paramilitaries knew better what was going on in the UK security services than vice versa. For several months after the Bull fiasco, the leaders of the UVF were uncertain whether to try again. The intercepted guns of 1913 had led to the proclamation against arms imports to Ireland and, probably, to the fateful orders of March to protect military depots. Major F. H. Crawford, a former Artillery officer who was acting as the UVF’s director of Ordnance, urged the UVF to buy 30,000 rifles in Hamburg. The leaders of the UVF made bellicose noises, but were quite hesitant about Crawford’s expedition, twice trying to call it off while he was on the high seas. Nevertheless Sir Edward Carson became the quartermaster for what became the Larne gunrunning. He had at least £90,000 subscribed by sympathizers in England, including Rudyard Kipling who paid £30,000 (Stewart 1967: 136). The most startling claim in the whole story is Crawford’s statement, written in 1915, that on 27 March he called and saw Walter Long, MP. He sent his secretary to see Bonar Law. The latter when introduced to me said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I have heard of you before, Mr Crawford’. I had a private letter from the Chief [Carson] . . . to him. I had to see WL about the finances of the business, and make my final arrangements for paying [a] very large cheque. (Fred Crawford, ‘Diary of the gunrunning’ in Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, PRONI D/ 1700/5/17/2/4)

The standard biographies state that Law did not know about the Larne gunrunning until after the event. However, in the Appendix to this chapter we show that Law likely knew that something was afoot. His apparent encouragement of Crawford is consistent with his behaviour at Blenheim, over the Army Act and over the Curragh.9 By mid-March, Crawford had enough money to buy his 30,000 rifles and 3 million ammunition rounds. Prices were high as Hamburg dealers were also supplying Mexicans for their civil war. The plan would also involve buying ships for cash at short notice, since no questions could be asked. On 16 March (four days before the Curragh), Crawford bought outright a Norwegian collier, SS Fanny. The Fanny was to pick up the rifles from a Hamburg lighter at Langeland, in Danish Baltic territorial waters. Danish customs officers

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spotted the transfer of cargo and came to investigate, demanding the papers of both vessels. They promised to return the next day. Crawford was caught. I went into my cabin and threw myself on my knees, and in simple language told God all about it: what this meant to Ulster, that there was nothing sordid in what we desired, that we wanted nothing selfishly. I pointed out all this to God, and thought of the old Psalm, ‘O God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come’. (Ibid, quoting the opening of Psalm 90 in the Scottish Metrical Psalter10)

God, or luck, helped. Both ships eloped in the night before Danish customs could return. Unfortunately, news of the arrest, with accurate guesses as to the Fanny’s cargo and destination, appeared in the English papers. The UVF tried to countermand Crawford’s orders, but did not know where he was and had no radio. Having renamed and repainted the Fanny, Crawford sailed coastwise round Wales, where he put off at Tenby and went to Belfast to consult the UVF committee, and to London to get his large cheque. The UVF authorized him to buy another collier, the Clydevalley, in Glasgow for £4,500. The arms were transhipped at night off Wexford as the Fanny and Clydevalley were made fast together and ‘steamed through the traffic with one set of lights’ (Stewart 1967: 195). Crawford now renamed the Clydevalley the Mountjoy II and made for Belfast Lough. The Ulster Volunteers had announced a training exercise centred on Larne, the ferry port in Protestant country near the mouth of Belfast Lough. On the night of 24–25 April 1914, they took total control of the port, cutting all telephone lines and blockading all roads out. The railway was also in Unionist hands, but for added security 600 Volunteers were assembled at Belfast York Road to prevent any attempt to send a troop train to Larne. A decoy ship was sent to Belfast, where it was intercepted by Customs. Meanwhile, the Clydevalley was unloaded by the Larne dockers, also known as the Larne Harbour section of the Volunteers. All Volunteers’ motor cars in Co. Antrim had been ordered to arrive at Larne by 1 a.m. The only hitch was that the Innismurray, one of the two ships chosen for coastwise delivery of some of the guns, turned out to have a Nationalist captain. ‘The saboteurs [sic] were replaced by a volunteer crew of more reliable politics,’ relates Stewart, though he does not tell us how, nor what happened to the master and crew. The following description is from a police report in Asquith’s papers: Mr Robinson said . . . that as Commanding Officer of the East Antrim Regiment [of the UVF] he had orders from Sir William Adair not to allow anyone to approach the harbour . . . I asked him if it was intended to prevent the police and Customs officers from going there in discharge of their duty and he said It was. I asked him would he prevent them by force

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and he said he was prepared to do so and that he had 700 men there for that purpose if necessary.11

Belfast customs, when they spotted the other delivery ship tying up, ‘were met by a determined U.V.F. guard’ and did not get to see her cargo of rifles (Stewart 1967: 206–8). A Unionist pamphlet of August illustrates how, as each vehicle of the motor car corps left Larne with its cargo of rifles, a washerwoman daubed its licence plate with tar so as to obscure it, accompanied by a cry of ‘There you go m’dear’ (PRONI, Carson Papers, D1507/A/5/ 28). The only casualty of the night was a coastguard who had a fatal heart attack while cycling with a dispatch to a superior officer. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who was staying with Carson when the success of the operation was confirmed, reportedly exclaimed ‘Magnificent!’ (McNeill 1922: 220).

WHY THE UNIONIST COUP SUCCEEDED The primary definition of ‘coup d’e´tat’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘a sudden and decisive stroke of state policy’. Both Curragh and Larne fit that description. They do not fit the secondary definition: ‘spec. a sudden and great change in the government carried out violently or illegally by the ruling power’. They were not violent, nor carried out by the ruling power. But at least the following were unlawful:  At the Curragh: ○ Insubordination and perhaps sedition (Major General Wilson); ○ Insubordination (Brigadier-General Gough, for showing his ‘undertaking’ to all and sundry on return to Ireland in defiance of orders).  At Larne: ○ Breach of the Royal Proclamation against importing arms to Ireland (Carson, Lord Milner, Crawford, Long, the officials of the UVF); ○ Sailing without papers and falsification of ships’ identities (Crawford); ○ Disobeying an order of Danish customs (Crawford); ○ Disobedience of ships’ lighting regulations (Crawford); ○ False imprisonment of the crew of the Innismurray; ○ Criminal damage to telephone lines; ○ Obstruction of police and customs (freely admitted—see earlier).12 After Larne, the government again considered prosecuting Carson, Adair, and Major Robert McCalmont (Unionist MP for East Antrim and commander

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of the Central Antrim UVF). However, advised by Irish Party leader John Redmond that a prosecution would be counterproductive, they did nothing. The paramilitaries also behaved as if they were the revolutionary government of Catholic Ulster. According to an intelligence report: Great annoyance is caused to the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Co. Monaghan, who are in a large majority, by being challenged when walking along the roads at night by so-called sentries of the UVF . . . and being asked for passwords or countersigns. . . . [T]he continuance of this practice by the Ulster Volunteers is very dangerous as it may cause a serious outbreak at any moment. (‘Further notes on the Movement in Ulster’, circulated to Cabinet by A. Birrell, 05.03.1914. MS Mottistone Box 16)

How did so many Unionists persuade themselves to break a wide range of laws? The lead came from the top. Bonar Law and Carson made public statements of inflexible extremism. They were more flexible in private— Law, in particular, had three private meetings with Asquith—but their followers did not know that. Bonar Law worked particularly hard on the king. Initially the king found Law prickly and uncomfortable company. However, he soon adopted Law’s words as his own. In August 1913, the king wrote in his own hand to Asquith: Whatever I do I shall offend half the population. One alternative wouldcertainly result in alienating the Ulster Protestants from me, and whatever happens the result must be detrimental to me personally and to the Crown in general.

He complained that the government was ‘drifting’, and asked Asquith to consult the Opposition in order to get an agreed settlement. A month later he went further. Responding to Asquith’s claim that the Parliament Act had ‘not affected the Constitutional position of the Sovereign’, he replied: But the Preamble of the Bill stated an intention to create a new Second Chamber; that this could not be done immediately; meanwhile provision by the Bill would be made for restricting the powers of the House of Lords. Does not such an organic change in the Constitutional position of one of the Estates of the Realm also affect the relations of all three to one another; and the failure to replace it on an effective footing deprive the Sovereign of the assistance of the Second Chamber?

Going on to complain that the passage of the Home Rule Bill might lead to civil war, he complained: Do you propose to employ the army to suppress such disorders? . . . Will it be wise, will it be fair to the Sovereign as head of the Army, to subject the discipline, and indeed the loyalty, of his troops, to such a strain?13

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The handwriting was the king’s, but the arguments were Bonar Law’s. More precisely, they were arguments that Law had assembled from a number of Unionists, including Professor A. V. Dicey and Field Marshal Lord Roberts. The two main contentions were:  The Constitution had been in abeyance since 1911.  In the event of civil war, the loyalties of the armed forces to the Ministers of the Crown were dissolved. A summary of the Unionist constitutional arguments is given in Table 5.2. They appealed to the king, who urged Asquith to compromise: to discuss his proposals with the Unionists; to propose the temporary exclusion of Ulster from Home Rule; to call a general election; to consider a scheme for federalism, with ‘Home Rule All Round’ for England, Scotland, and Wales as well. He seriously considered either dissolving the Parliament or refusing Royal Assent to the Government of Ireland Act. Asquith was equally forthright. The king undoubtedly had the right to dismiss the government and dissolve the Parliament, but the last one to do so was William IV in 1834, ‘one of the least wise of British monarchs’. The Tories, whom William favoured, lost the election, and he was stuck again with the Whigs whom he had tried to oust. As to Ireland, Asquith swept aside the king’s speculations that most Irishmen were no longer interested in Home Rule and that the Catholic Church did not want it. Asquith did not take the Unionist arguments for a forced dissolution seriously. Nor, unfortunately, did his administration call the Ulster paramilitaries’ bluff until it was no longer a bluff. As a consequence, the Government of Ireland Act 1914 was unworkable from the moment it received Royal Assent. A Suspensory Act delayed the operation of both Irish Home Rule and Welsh disestablishment until the end of the war. When it ended, the Welsh got their wish but the Irish did not. Thus, the leaders of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition encouraged armed rebellion against His Majesty’s Government. Only one source that we have found directly implicates Bonar Law in Larne; but there is no doubt about Sir William Bull MP, Sir Edward Carson MP, Captain James Craig (later Lord Craigavon), Lord Milner, Captain Fred Crawford CBE, Major Robert McCalmont MP, Major General (later Field Marshal Sir) Henry Wilson, or Field Marshal Lord Roberts. A selection from the copious evidence that links the leaders of Unionism to the armed conspiracy in Ulster is given in Table 5.3.

Table 5.2 Unionist constitutional arguments 1911–14. Argument

Source

Example of use

Effect

‘The Constitution is in suspense because of the 1911 Preamble’

Lord Lansdowne, Unionist leader in H of L

A Revolutionary Committee . . . has seized upon despotic power by fraud. . . . In our opposition to them we shall not be . . . bound by the restraints which would influence us in an ordinary Constitutional struggle. We shall take the means, whatever means seem to us effective, to deprive them of the despotic power which they have usurped… [T]here are things stronger than Parliamentary majorities. . . . Bonar Law at Blenheim 29.07.12, in Blake, Unknown PM, p.130. Stated as fact by George V in his memo to Asquith 22.09.13.

Forced GE; royal veto of GoI Act (see next row); armed insurrection in Ulster all ok.

The King may veto the GoI Bill

Bonar Law

They may say that your assent is a purely formal act and the prerogative of veto is dead. That was true as long as there was a buffer between you and the House of Commons, but they have destroyed that buffer and its true no longer. Law to King 4.5.12, according to A. Chamberlain. Blake, Unknown PM: 133

Govt would resign after veto, therefore forced GE.

Fundamental constitutional change should be put to a referendum

Dicey

[T]he referendum judiciously used may, at any rate in the case of England, by checking the omnipotence of partisanship, revive faith in that parliamentary government which has been the glory of English constitutional history. Dicey, Law of the Constitution 8th edn p. c.

Repeal of Parliament Act and nonimplementation of GoI Act.

Lords may amend the Army (Annual) Act

Lord Hugh Cecil, Unionist frontbencher and intellectual

Would ‘compel the government to refer the question of Home Rule to the people . . . [H of Lords had] the right to insist that before the standing army is used to establish Home Rule in Ireland against the will of a large section of the Irish population, it should at least be certain that the electorate approve of Home Rule and of such use of the King’s armed forces. Memo, 5.6.13 in G. Boyce and A, O’Day ed, The Ulster Crisis, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006): 58.

Forced referendum on GoI Bill and/ or forced GE. Govt believed the threat credible, see Atty-Gen. Cabinet memo March 1914.

The Irish aren’t interested in Home Rule, therefore there is no point in forcing it down the throats of Protestant Ulster

Bonar Law, ?Lord Midleton (southern Irish Unionist leader) and/or Lansdowne

But is the demand for Home Rule in Ireland as earnest and as National today as it was, for instance, in the days of Parnell? Has not the Land Purchase Policy settled the agrarian trouble, which was the chief motive of the Home Rule agitation? I am assured by resident Landowners in the South and West of Ireland that their tenants, while ostensibly favourable to Home Rule, are no longer enthusiastic about it. . . . The hierarchy of the Church of Rome is indifferent and probably at heart would be glad not to come under the power of an Irish Parliament. George V to Asquith, 22.9.13, in Appendix to Chapter 12.

No disorder in nationalist Ireland if Govt drop the GoI Bill.

The people hate Home Rule

Bonar Law, Dicey, and many others

[T]he present Bill . . . is opposed by practically the whole of the House of Lords; by one third of the House of Commons; by half the population of England . . . Ibid. [NB Unionists always say England, never the

Referendum should be held, perhaps only in GB.

(continued )

Table 5.2 (Continued) Argument

Source

Example of use United Kingdom, when promoting this argument].

If civil war is pending, the Army is released from its duty to uphold the civil power

Bonar Law, Lord Roberts, Milner

It is a soldier’s duty to obey, but if and when Civil War breaks out no ordinary rules will apply. In that case a soldier will reflect that by joining the Army he has not ceased to be a citizen, and if he fights in such a quarrel he will fight on the side he believes to be right. Draft letter to press by Roberts, approved by Law and Carson to be issued in event of Army orders against Protestant paramilitaries, 27.1.14, in Blake, Unknown PM: 178.

Effect

Table 5.3 The Unionist coup d’e´tat 1913–14. Source

Date

Author

Document

Comment

Churchill College Bull MSS 4/8

4.6.13

FT Bigham, CID, Scotland Yard

Capt Budden [WB’s bro-in-law] is Organising officer of the National Reserve of the Hammersmith District. . . . W J Silcock [is] . . . proprietor of the premises where the cases are stored . . . intimate friends, together with Sir William Bull . . . members of the same Political Association (Conservative & Unionist).

File marked ‘This material opened and returned to file on instructions of Cabinet Office April 2004’. Bull was political secretary to Walter Long.

Churchill College Bull MSS 4/8

16.6.13

H. P. Budden to Sir W Bull

The members of the political side of Scotland Yard in this case are Irwin of course as chief McBrien Riley & Parker they say they have us all smoked in their jargon but the Government are scratching what to do the whole thing was given away by a case of Rifles breaking in half either at the Hamburg Docks or here in 48 hours every port (i. e., Custom officials) was warned.

As above

IWM HHW 1/23

23.3.14

Henry Wilson

I went to B.L. at 9.10 am. Told him that I was going to claim equal treatment with Hubert [Gough] & that I felt confident the whole G.S. would follow me; told him Hubert had been in to breakfast & we had determined our plan of campaign which was that any proposals made must be in writing & must state that he would not be called on to imploy his troops and coerce Ulster to accept the present H.R. bill.

IWM HHW 1/23

26.3.14

Henry Wilson

Talk with Bonar Law and Milner after breakfast. It seems to me Johnny French must resign, but the rest of us must stand fast unless the Government take action against Hubert. Wired him again to

At least one Divisional Commander—Fergusson, who was in Ireland trying to contain the effects of the Curragh—cannot have been there. (continued )

Table 5.3 (Continued) Source

Date

Author

Document

Comment

keep absolutely quiet. Sir John [French] sent for us three Directors at 1 o’c and told us he had resigned, but Seely would not accept. Directly after, all Cs in C and Divisional Commanders came into the CIGS’s room and told him the army was unanimous in its determination not to fight Ulster. This is superb. At 3 o’c Sir John sent for me to talk things over. He told me the Cabinet are all opposed to his going and were trying to find some way out of it. I told him that he and Ewart must stick to their resignations. . . IWM HHW 1/23

29.3.14

Henry Wilson

I lunched at Bonar Law’s house, only Carson there fresh back from Belfast. We talked about the situation in all its bearings. Carson told me of . . . the visits of all officers of the Pathfinder to him, and of the petty officers, of the friendship between the Navy and the Ulster boys, and of the signalling practice that goes on between the two, and of how excellent the Ulster men are.

HMS Pathfinder had been sent to the Ulster coast to aid with operations to protect arms depots. Her Captain had written to his Rear-Admiral to say ‘I have no intention of going against Ulster’. Beckett 1986: 284.

Bonar Law MSS 32/1/ 65

22.3.14

Lord Stamfordham to BL

My dear Bonar Law, Many thanks for the copy of your letter of today to the Prime Minister, which the King has read with interest. Indeed this is a most serious disaster to the Army—worse than a defeat at the hands of an enemy—nothing to compare with it has happened in the history of our country—the facts as to what actually happened are not yet positively known. If the Govt will not

The king’s secretary gives political advice to the Leader of the Opposition, suggesting a way around the problem of Fermanagh and Tyrone and their inconvenient nationalist majorities.

have Referendum on the liberal terms you offered —could you not press for exclusion of 6 counties without referendum—(by this means you wd avoid certain zones) and for an unlimited period— and increase the subsidy from the English treasury to say 5 millions. Worth the money! Yrs very truly, Stamfordham Bonar Law MSS 32/1/ 75

28.3.14

AV Dicey to BL

PRONI D/ 1700

July 1915, refers to 27.3.14

Fred Crawford diary

The plain truth is that at the present crisis it is absolutely essential that we should either get rid of the Government or ensure an appeal to the people by way of a dissolution or a referendum before the Home Rule Bill passes into law. Arrived in London. Called and saw Mr Walter Long, MP. He sent his secretary to see Bonar Law. The latter when introduced to me said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I have heard of you before, Mr Crawford’. I had a private letter from the Chief, whom I left in Belfast, to him. I had to see WL about the finances of the business, and make my final arrangements for paying [a]very large cheque.

[but ‘though I am a believer in the referendum’, doesn’t think it should be forced this time because Asquith would control the wording and timing]

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? IMPLICATIONS OF CURRAGH AND LARNE FOR C O N ST I T U T IO NA L T H E O RY: P O S I T IV E TH E O RY

In 1914, the Unionist leaders, including Professor Dicey, observed neither the rule of law nor parliamentary sovereignty. Because they regarded the 1911 Parliament Act as somehow fraudulent, they were prepared to take extreme steps, some of them illegal, to prevent the enactment of Home Rule. In normal times, the elected government can use its control of parliament to enact whatever it likes. Parliamentary sovereignty, as subsumed in veto player theory, then says that the elected government may override all vetoes, including any purported vetoes in the shape of attempts to entrench earlier Acts. With few veto players, the winset of the status quo comprises any points to which the elected government might choose to go. With more veto players, the winset of the status quo contracts to the set of points that no veto player regards as inferior to the status quo. What then upset the supremacy of the elected UK government between 1909 and 1914? At one level the answer is easy. The House of Lords exercised a veto in 1909. Though that veto was modified by the Parliament Act, it was not eliminated. The three sessions needed to enact the Government of Ireland Act (spring 1912–autumn 1914) were the three sessions needed to turn the Ulster Volunteers from bluff to credible threat. Both kings—Edward VII and George V—vetoed their Liberal governments. Their actions increased the power of the Opposition and decreased that of the government. If defeated in even one of the forced 1910 general elections, the programme of the Liberals and their allies would have been aborted. Some public servants abandoned, or never showed, loyalty to their elected superiors. Chapter 4 showed that the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury encouraged Lord Rosebery to reject the 1909 Budget. His actions were mild compared to (Sir) Henry Wilson’s.

. . . N O R M AT I V E TH E O RY At a purely formal level, parliamentary sovereignty supplies Hart’s ‘rule of recognition’. Judges are to recognize that parliament is sovereign in one of two senses—either the sense in which each parliament individually is sovereign, so that any parliament may override any law of its predecessors, or a broader sense in which ‘parliament’, as a continuing institution, can occasionally bind itself in constitutional statutes such as the Parliament Act 1911. Yet, in 1914, the Unionist leadership, including Dicey, disowned that theory. The Parliament

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Act 1911 had turned the elected government into a ‘Revolutionary Committee’, they said, as they formed a counter-revolutionary committee of their own. The Unionists’ alternative theory of sovereignty was a badly formulated appeal to the people. The Home Rule Bill must either be stopped outright or be put to the people, who, they were totally confident, would reject it. This idea underlies everything: the Army Act ploy, Curragh, Larne, the intense pressure on the king either to dismiss the government or to veto Home Rule. This is discussed more fully in the next two chapters. But how could they be sure that they represented the people? Asquith told the king: The Parliament Act . . . has not affected . . . the constitutional position of the Sovereign. It deals only with differences between the two Houses. When the two Houses are in agreement (as is always the case when there is a Conservative majority in the House of Commons), the Act is a dead letter. When they differ, it provides that, after a considerable interval, the thrice repeated decision of the Commons shall prevail, without the necessity for a dissolution of Parliament. (Appendix to Chapter 12)

The people had voted for a Liberal, or Liberal-led, government in three general elections in a row. Even in Ulster, the Liberals and Nationalists held seventeen seats to the Unionists’ sixteen. Table 5.4 gives more details. The Unionists did have a grievance, but not one that we have seen expressed: gerrymandering. The Irish constituencies had not been redistributed in 1885, unlike those in Britain. It is clear that this was bipartisan, in order to let the sleeping Nationalist dog lie, and that the leaders of both British parties at the time, Gladstone and Salisbury, concurred. Salisbury could have used the Lords’ veto to force an Irish redistribution and reduction in seats had he thought it desirable. But Salisbury’s inaction harmed the Ulster Protestants. Constituencies in Ulster had become very unequal in population by 1914, so that the Liberals and Nationalists won more seats, with fewer votes, than the Unionists. Nevertheless, Table 5.4 gives the lie to any conception of a homogeneous Protestant Unionist Ulster.

DISCUSSION: OBSERVA BLE IMPLICATIONS We have required an extensive narrative to justify our contention that the events of spring 1914 constituted a successful coup against the elected government of the United Kingdom. We have done this because with

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Table 5.4 Religion and politics in Ulster 1914. Home Rule Ulster Constituency S Armagh W Cavan E Cavan N Donegal W Donegal E Donegal S Donegal S Down S Fermanagh N Monaghan S Monaghan N Tyrone Mid Tyrone E Tyrone W Belfast Newry Town Londonderry City Subtotal Home Rule seats Unionist Ulster N Antrim Mid Antrim E Antrim S Antrim N Armagh Mid Armagh N Down E Down W Down N Derry S Derry N Fermanagh S Tyrone E Belfast S Belfast N Belfast Subtotal Unionist seats TOTAL

RC population 1911

Non RC population 1911

Total population

23,511 38,011 36,177 33,503 42,085 24,657 32,698 24,441 18,948 24,354 28,987 20,144 22,308 20,561 36,577 9,183 22,978 459,123

11,050 9,170 7,713 7,560 4,166 14,983 8,768 21,232 11,743 12,204 5,850 16,622 13,277 16,933 30,340 3,270 17,821 212,702

34,561 47,181 43,890 41,063 46,251 39,640 41,466 45,673 30,691 36,558 34,837 36,766 35,585 37,494 66,917 12,453 40,799 671,825

10,629 9,575 6,627 12,526 13,616 17,000 7,166 16,539 7,651 18,505 22,953 15,801 15,922 25,018 13,265 18,218 231,011

32,915 33,377 48,524 36,486 31,854 22,538 52,850 31,114 35,083 34,452 23,912 15,319 16,670 111,080 67,715 81,847 675,736

43,544 42,952 55,151 49,012 45,470 39,538 60,016 47,653 42,734 52,957 46,865 31,120 32,592 136,098 80,980 100,065 906,747

690,134

888,438

1,578,572

Source: George Philp & Co., Political Map of Ulster in 1912, Mottistone Papers, incorporating religious data from 1911 Census; authors’ calculations to take account of Londonderry City by-election 30.01.13 (Lib. gain from Con.).

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few exceptions the historiography of the period is so bland.14 The standard work on the UK monarchy and the constitution argues that the two kings ought to have refused even more firmly than they did Asquith’s requests for the creation of peers, and that on Ulster in 1914 ‘the king’s judgement was superior to that of his prime minister’.15 How an eminent political scientist, using essentially the same evidence base as us, can reach these conclusions eludes us. The purpose of this chapter is analytic as well as descriptive. Descriptively, we have shown that four unelected veto players enabled the coup to succeed. These veto roles, played by varying people, were the median member of the House of Lords, the monarchy, the set of army officers prepared to mutiny or resign rather than obey orders, and the Ulster Protestant paramilitaries. The leaders of the Commons Opposition, not themselves veto players, supplied ammunition (literally in the case of Larne) for all four. How then has the belief that the United Kingdom is a low-n veto-player regime, with a large win set over the status quo, become so persistent in modern political science?16 First, we argue, because the veto power of the post-1911, pre-1999 House of Lords has been ignored or mischaracterized. For all that period, the median Lord was a Conservative, as he had been since the late eighteenth century. He always held a potential veto in the last two years (after 1949, in the last year) of a parliament. Towards the end of a parliament, it is common knowledge that there is insufficient time for the government to legislate without the Lords under the terms of the Parliament Acts. Even nearer the start of a parliament, time is always scarce, so that the median peer, though not a formal veto player, may be in a position to block potential legislation that is not high on the government’s agenda. How have political scientists managed to miss this (to us) glaringly obvious fact? First, as Asquith told George V, because the veto power is not evident in periods of Conservative government, when the median peer is close in issue space to the median MP. Therefore, scope for it arose only in the periods 1911–15, 1924, 1929–31, 1945–51, 1964–70, 1974–9, and 1997–9. The period since 1999 is discussed in Chapter 11. Since 1945 it has been modified by the ‘Salisbury–Addison convention’, whereby the Conservative leaders of the Lords undertook not to veto the manifesto commitments of the elected government. This convention and its collapse, after 1999, are also discussed in Chapter 11. But as Salisbury–Addison is merely a convention, it does not restrict the median peer’s formal veto power. That there were not constant vetoes of government legislation in the parliaments just listed merely reflects parliamentarians’ common knowledge of the veto power.

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Table 5.5 Veto plays by UK monarchs. Monarch

Reigned

Example veto play

Elizabeth II and I George VI Edward VIII

1952– 1936–52 1936

George V

1910–36

Edward VII

1901–10

Victoria

1837–1901

William IV

1830–7

George IV

1820–30

George III

1760–1820

None known None known Attempted marriage contrary to ministers’ wishes Threat to dissolve Parliament or withhold Royal Assent from Government of Ireland Bill, 1913–14 Refusal to create peers without second general election 1909–10 Attempts to prevent Gladstone from becoming Prime Minister, 1886 and 1892 Dismissal of PM Lord Melbourne, 1834 Delay and attempted veto of Catholic emancipation 1828–9 Veto of Catholic Emancipation in Ireland 1801

Veto play successful?

No Partial

Yes No

Yes No Yes

Sources: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; C. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1898 (Oxford: OUP 1997); I. McLean and A. McMillan, State of the Union (Oxford, OUP, 2005); V. Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution; R. Jenkins, Asquith.

That the monarchy is not regarded as an active veto player, is an overgeneralization from the behaviour of the last two monarchs in the series, George VI and Elizabeth II and I, who have indeed never threatened vetoes, as constitutional theory says they should not. Table 5.5, which is not exhaustive, lists attempted and successful veto plays by the last ten monarchs of the United Kingdom. All of them (except Edward VIII, who failed), vetoed or attempted to veto radical, rather than conservative, actions and/or governments. A future monarch with strong conservative opinions might revive the trend. The whole army was not behind the contingent mutineers of the Curragh; but enough of its senior officers were behind them to veto the deployment of troops to Ulster in support of the civil power. Others in the drama, especially Paget and Seely, made unforced blunders which made matters worse. But the Gough–Wilson faction in the army vetoed the policy of the elected government. Nothing remotely comparable has happened in the

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British Army since 1914, but other democracies have been deposed in military coups since then. Finally, the intransigence of Ulster Protestantism owes something to Calvinist theology. Whether it be Fred Crawford asking God to save him from arrest by the Danes, or more tragically the march of the UVF, transformed into the Thirty-sixth (Ulster) Division, straight into German lines on 1 July 1916, shouting as they went ‘No Surrender’ and ‘Remember 1690’ (Stewart 1967: 239), Calvinists’ certainty that God is on their side is a source of both strength and weakness. On 1 and 2 July 1916, the Thirty-sixth Ulster Division lost 5,500 troops, killed, wounded, and missing. This exceeds the total toll of violent deaths in Northern Ireland from 1968 to date. Calvinism remains a strand of Ulster Protestantism.17 Of these vetoes, that of Ulster Protestants (outside Ulster) and the Army are now dead; that of the monarch is at least sleeping. That of the House of Lords remained in full force until 1999. Further research could usefully examine the constraints it imposed on non-Conservative UK governments from 1911 to 1999.

Ap p e n d i x t o C h a p t e r 5 . How Mu c h D i d B o n a r L aw Kn ow Ab o u t t h e L a r n e Gun r u n n i n g ? Letters from and to Ronald McNeill MP, 21.12.1921. Law MSS, Parliamentary Archives, BL 107/1/107 and 107/4/18 My dear Bonar, I don’t know whether I told you that I am writing a book on the Ulster resistance to Home Rule; but I have just now been reading for it a MS of Fred Crawford’s, the gun-runner. I see he says that just on the eve of the voyage of the “Fanny” James Craig told him “that Bonar Law & Walter Long would like to meet me before I went, so I saw both these statesmen & they wished me God speed & a successful issue” I should like to know whether you have any objection to my publishing this statement that you were privy to, & wished well to, the gunrunning, or whether you would prefer not to have your name mentioned. I will of course do as you wish about it. Yours ever, Ronald McNeill. My dear Ronald, It is difficult looking back so far to feel sure that one’s memory is accurate but my recollection is that I did not know of the gunrunning till after it had taken place & that Carson told me that he had deliberately refrained from letting me know about it because he thought it better that in my position I shd not have any responsibility for it. You had better ask Carson [?word illegible, perh. ‘now’] whether or not his recollection tallies with mine. I do not remember seeing Mr Crawford, but I saw at different times with Carson a number of our supporters in Belfast & very likely Mr Crawford may have been one of them. All this however is very immaterial. I took full responsibility at the time for all that was done & have never thought since that I was wrong in doing so. Yours sincerely [unsigned, BL’s file copy].

Although Law does not explicitly corroborate Crawford’s claim, he concedes that he may have met Crawford; he does not deny the outline of the story: he explains that Carson was deliberately keeping him in the dark, and he claims full responsibility for his actions in 1914. It is hard to believe that he did not

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guess where the very large sums of money being raised in Britain for the Ulster Protestants were going. Law had served for over four years as Deputy Prime Minister to Lloyd George. In March 1921 he had retired through illhealth. By December he had returned to politics in order to protect Protestant Ulster in Lloyd George’s Irish settlement. Ulster Protestants and their allies, including McNeill, denounced the Sinn Fein delegates who had signed a treaty with Lloyd George on 6 December as rebels and murderers. It hardly suited Law’s purposes to admit that he had encouraged rebellion on the opposite side. That he was willing to go so far in his reply to McNeill is eloquent. He could have simply said No. His letter has a tone, as our French teacher used to tell us, of Qui s’excuse, s’accuse.

6 The Contradictions of Professor Dicey [N]either the Act of Union with Scotland nor the Dentists Act, 1878, has more claim than the other to be considered a supreme law. Each embodies the will of the sovereign legislative power; each can be legally altered or repealed by Parliament; neither tests the validity of the other. Should the Dentists Act, 1878, unfortunately contradict the terms of the Act of Union, the Act of Union would be pro tanto repealed . . . The one fundamental dogma of English [sic] constitutional law is the absolute legislative sovereignty or despotism of the King in Parliament. (Dicey 1885/1915: 141) No work that I have ever read brings out in a more distinct and emphatic manner . . . the absolute supremacy of Parliament [than Dicey’s Law of the Constitution]. (W. E. Gladstone, introducing the Government of Ireland Bill 1886, House of Commons 09.04.1886. In Matthew 1999: 469) I am absolutely certain that nothing but great energy . . . will avert this calamity [viz, Home Rule for Ireland]. I do most earnestly implore you, and every influential unionist, to put in the forefront of our claims the demand for a dissolution before the third session of the bill has begun. I know you will think that I am on the point of unionism a fanatic; it is a case in which a good deal more fanaticism would do a great deal of good. (A. V. Dicey to Walter Long, MP. 16.04.1913. Long MSS, British Library add mss 62406) The statesmen of 1707, though giving full sovereign power to the Parliament of Great Britain, clearly believed in the possibility of creating an absolutely sovereign legislature which should yet be bound by unalterable laws . . . [T]he enactment of laws which are described as unchangeable, immutable, or the like, is not necessarily futile. The declaration contained in the Act for Securing the Protestant religion and Presbyterian Church government within the Kingdom of Scotland, which is embodied in the Act of Union . . . is not unmeaning. (Dicey and Rait 1920: 252–3)

A. V. Dicey was guilty of a simple contradiction in believing both that the Acts of Union 1707 were fundamental, and that they preserved the English tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. This has been challenged (Bogdanor 2007: 2008).1 Nevertheless, this chapter aims to show that:

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Dicey is indeed guilty of contradiction; from a contradiction anything follows; his passionate political views led him into dubious places; Dicey’s first position is untenable and unrealistic; his second and third positions can be rescued but only by better arguments for popular sovereignty or entrenchment than Dicey ever offered.

We follow H. L. A. Hart’s useful distinction between two versions of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Hart writes: [O]lder constitutional theorists wrote as if it was a logical necessity that there should be a legislature which was sovereign, in the sense that it is free, at every moment of its existence as a continuing body, not only from legal limitations imposed ab extra, but also from its own prior legislation . . . [A]nother principle . . . might equally well, perhaps better, deserve the name of ‘sovereignty’. This is the principle that Parliament should not be incapable of limiting irrevocably the legislative competence of its successors but, on the contrary, should have this wider self-limiting power. Parliament would at least once in its history be capable of exercising an even larger sphere of legislative competence than the accepted established doctrine allows to it. (Hart 1961: 145; see also Young 2006)

Hart calls the former conception ‘continuing omnipotence’ and the latter ‘selfembracing omnipotence’ (his italics). Which form of parliamentary sovereignty applies is an empirical question; ‘the presently [in 1961] accepted rule is one of continuing sovereignty, so that Parliament cannot protect its statutes from repeal’.

DICEY’S THREE DOCTRINES O F S OVEREIGNTY Obviously, Dicey was one of the ‘older constitutional theorists’ in Hart’s sights. In his 1885 text, as republished seven times up to 1915, his comparison of the scope of the Act of Union 1707 and the Dentists Act 1878 is an assertive statement of continuing omnipotence. Introducing the Government of Ireland Bill 1886 (better known as the first ‘Home Rule’ Bill), W. E. Gladstone praised Dicey’s recently published text, which he had been studying assiduously as he prepared his Irish legislation. According to Dicey’s text, the Parliament was fully entitled to amend the Act of Union 1800 by granting a limited measure of devolution to Ireland. As we have seen, the 1886 bill failed. The Second (1893) and Third (1912) Home

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Rule Bills were carried in the elected house of the Parliament but defeated in one of the unelected houses, the House of Lords. Under the provisions of the Parliament Act 1911, the 1912 Bill became the Government of Ireland Act 1914 without Lords’ consent. However, Dicey passionately tried to block it, as our third introductory quotation shows. He wrote that there might be ‘acts of oppression on the part of a democracy, no less than of a king, which justify resistance to the law, or, in other words, rebellion’; the 1912 Bill lacked ‘constitutional authority’ (Dicey 1913: 114) because it had not been confirmed in a general election. However, the governing Liberals had won three successive general elections, the last two of them (January and December 1910) forced by the Lords’ rejection of the 1909 Budget and the refusal of two successive kings to overturn Lords’ vetoes without a general election. Dicey’s claim that the government lacked constitutional authority for the Government of Ireland Act makes no Diceyan sense. Dicey was reportedly furious at Gladstone’s use of his name to justify the 1886 bill. He published four critiques of Home Rule, each more strident than the previous: England’s Case Against Home Rule (1886), Unionist Delusions (1887), A Leap in the Dark (1893, republished 1911), and A Fool’s Paradise (1913). In The Verdict (1890), Dicey claimed that commissioners investigating rural intimidation in Ireland under Parnell had proved that the Land League and its leaders were guilty of treason, sedition, and criminal conspiracy. In the long introduction to the eighth edition of The Law of the Constitution (1915), Dicey called for a referendum on contentious constitutional legislation. Finally, his Thoughts on the Scottish Union (1920), written with the Historiographer-Royal for Scotland, revisited the 1707 Act of Union in a calmer tone of voice. In these seven books, plus his numerous letters to Unionist politicians, Dicey moved from the doctrine of continuing omnipotence first to an illexpressed doctrine of popular sovereignty, and then towards self-embracing omnipotence. Gladstone had skewered him in 1886. Under continuing omnipotence, the Act of Union 1800 had no entrenched status. Therefore, the Parliament had the unfettered power to pass a Government of Ireland Act, as it finally did in 1914. Dicey very badly wanted the Parliament not to pass a Government of Ireland Act, so he repudiated continuing omnipotence. The increased strength of party discipline meant that his 1885 version of self-correcting unitary democracy did not preserve popular sovereignty in the manner in which he wished. At the peak of his fury he abandoned parliamentary sovereignty altogether. In A Leap in the Dark, he states (without evidence) that in 1893 the ‘hereditary House of Lords, and not the newly elected House of

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Commons, truly represented the will of the nation’ (Dicey 1893/1911: xvii) by overwhelmingly rejecting the second Home Rule Bill. In A Fool’s Paradise and letters to Unionist frontbenchers such as Walter Long, who may have been the paymaster of Larne, this blossoms into a complete confidence that Dicey and his friends represent the will of the nation. There are things stronger than parliamentary majorities, according to Bonar Law in his notorious Blenheim speech in July 1912 (Blake 1955: 130). Dicey agreed, calling for a referendum or a dissolution to prove that the will of the nation was what he said it was, and giving his authority to other ploys, such as an appeal to George V to veto the Home Rule Bill. In A Fool’s Paradise, Dicey observes that there are 40 million people in Great Britain and 4 million in Ireland, of whom a million are Unionists. (The actual Irish numbers, from the 1911 Census, are: total population 4,390,219, of whom 3,238,656 [73 per cent] were stated by the person returning the forms to be Roman Catholics. Great Britain’s population in 1911 was just under 41 million.) As an ‘old . . . Benthamite’, he declares that he prefers the welfare of the 40 million to that of the 3 million. This seems to imply that his much-touted referendum was not to take place in Ireland, or at least that if the UK majority in such a referendum was in favour of Home Rule while the Great Britain majority was against, the latter should prevail. If Home Rule were enacted and Unionist demands for a dissolution or a referendum ignored, the Act would: in the eyes of every Unionist, lack moral authority. The question will at once arise whether revolution, achieved by intrigue or fraud, may not be reversed or arrested . . . A combination of discordant parties is attempting to drive through Parliament, without an appeal to the electors, a policy which has been twice deliberately rejected by the electorate of the United Kingdom . . . Every loyal citizen of the United Kingdom ought in general, and as a paramount duty, to obey the law of the land, or, in other words, the clearly and indubitably expressed will of the nation. But . . . such obedience can be due only when a law is the clear and undoubted expression of the will of the nation.

When Dicey says that Home Rule has been ‘twice deliberately rejected by the electorate of the United Kingdom’ he must be referring to the General Elections of 1886 and 1895.2 But the second of those was not fought on Home Rule, which the outgoing Liberals had dropped on Gladstone’s retirement. If every general election were nevertheless treated as a referendum on Home Rule, then the Home Rule coalition had won four general elections since 1886 to the Unionist coalition’s three. He goes on to cite with approval ‘the old Whig doctrine that oppression, and especially resistance to the will of

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the nation, might justify what was technically conspiracy or rebellion’ (Dicey 1913: 44, 112–14, 126 respectively). These were weighty and carefully chosen words, when his party leader had stated at Blenheim the previous year ‘I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’ (Bonar Law 29.07.12, in Blake 1955: 130). Dicey firmly refuses to answer two obvious questions: 1. What if the forced general election he was demanding produced a fourth Home Rule majority in a row? ‘My reply is this . . . I will not try to give an opinion on a case which has not yet arisen and may probably never arise’. 2. ‘What are the limits within which the tyranny either of a king or of a democracy justifies civil war is not an inquiry on which I will enter’ (Dicey 1913: 114; 127). By 1913, therefore, Dicey has moved away from parliamentary sovereignty altogether to a belief in popular sovereignty (which underpins American and, arguably, Scottish constitutionalism). So extreme is his position in 1913 that he believes that people are obliged to obey the law only if it reflects the ‘the clearly and indubitably expressed will of the nation’. This may surprise public lawyers: not least because modern lawyers are unlikely to read the eighth edition of Dicey (1885/1915) in which his fury is laid bare. Subsequent editors suppressed the embarrassing eighth edition preface. Dicey’s total confidence that the will of the nation was what he said was never tested by either a dissolution or a referendum. But the nation included— as Dicey insisted it must include—nationalist Ireland, which would have voted unanimously for Home Rule in a referendum as it had done in seven general elections in a row. So it is not clear how Dicey ‘knew’ that the nation opposed Home Rule. We have quoted two alarming hints. The first is that the will of (at least nationalist) Ireland should not count towards the will of the nation. The second is that rebellion against a ‘democracy’ in the name of the ‘will of the nation’ might be justified. Dicey’s position in 1913–14 was ‘Parliament is sovereign, unless the elected house does something I deeply deplore, in which case the will of the people—which is what I say it is—is sovereign’. Thus Dicey contradicted himself. In the eighth edition of Law and the Constitution he argues both that Parliament ought always to be treated as sovereign (e.g. at p. 141) and that it sometimes ought not to be (e.g. at page xcix). From a contradiction anything follows. This contradictory text lacks authority. Constitutional commentators do not seem to regard Dicey’s anti-Home Rule polemics, his letters to Unionist politicians, and the embarrassing introduction to the eighth edition of Law and the Constitution as ‘really’ part of his writings. But he wrote them; he published most of them; he called

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his opponents ‘fools’ in the title of one of them; so why is it unfair or inappropriate to read them together, and thence to argue that his oeuvre is contradictory? Bogdanor (2008), in a riposte to an earlier version of this chapter, is more subtle. He argues that we confused four doctrines of Dicey’s, which he characterizes thus: 1. The legal doctrine that Parliament is sovereign. 2. The political doctrine that the unity of the United Kingdom is best preserved by maintaining the unitary state, federalism being unsuitable. 3. The political doctrine that there is no stable via media such as ‘Home Rule’ or ‘devolution’ lying between the unitary state and federalism. 4. The moral doctrine that there are certain things which a sovereign Parliament ought not to do. According to Bogdanor, Dicey’s constitutional writings, including Dicey (1885/1915), are about (1); his polemical writings are about (2–4); therefore, Bogdanor argues, there is no inconsistency. Dicey was (rightly, Bogdanor implies) furious at Mr Gladstone for making the same mistake as me when in his speech introducing the Home Rule Bill of 1886 he cited Dicey with approval for the opinion that the Parliament was entitled to grant devolution to Ireland. In favour of Bogdanor’s interpretation, Dicey repeatedly and eloquently states in the main text (not the introduction) of The Law and the Constitution that his task is to ‘state what are the laws which form part of the constitution, to arrange them in their order, to explain their meaning, and to exhibit where possible their logical connection’ (Dicey 1885/1915: 31). He distinguishes this from history and politics. He describes his task as analytic, not normative. Parliamentary sovereignty on this interpretation is concerned with the status of Acts after their enactment. Up to September 1914 it has nothing to say about the Government of Ireland Bills because none of them is an Act. Therefore, it is argued, there is no inconsistency in Professor Dicey being (in his own phrase) a ‘fanatic’ opponent of Home Rule and an upholder of parliamentary supremacy at the same time. In the most limited reading of parliamentary sovereignty, it is simply an instruction to the courts not to inquire into how an Act of Parliament was passed. Famous cases in which judges decided to keep out of that thicket were Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway v. Wauchope in 1842 and Ex parte Canon Selwyn in 1872. Wauchope complained that the Parliament had failed to follow correct procedures in passing the railway’s private Act. Canon Selwyn complained that the Queen was wrong to give royal assent to the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland as it contradicted her coronation oath, and that the courts should

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intervene. In both cases the courts declined: their job was merely to examine the ‘roll of Parliament’ to confirm that the Acts complained of had been duly passed and had received Royal Assent. Did Mr Gladstone, then, get Dicey completely wrong? If I err with Mr Gladstone, I am in good company. But I fail to see where the error lies. At the most trivial level, if (what I do not accept) the main text of Dicey (1885/ 1915) is merely a footnote to Wauchope and Ex parte Selwyn, what about the hundred-page preface to the same work, in which Dicey shares his fierce Unionism with his readers? Given that, as I have just shown, it contradicts the main text, which are we to believe? Consider the range of actions that Dicey is prepared to endorse in order to prevent the Government of Ireland Bill becoming law. He calls for a referendum, arguing that since the 1911 Act Parliament has degenerated into an elective dictatorship of the Commons only. For the same reason he is willing to endorse almost anything the Ulster Unionists are threatening to do on the grounds that this corrupted ‘Parliament’ is opposed to the ‘will of the people’. In an earlier book (Dicey 1890) he claims that the Irish Party under Parnell has been guilty of sedition and criminal conspiracy; yet he is prepared to endorse comparable actions when undertaken by Unionists. The distinction he vigorously makes between the analytical and the normative is untenable. His analysis has normative implications. For instance his chapter on the Army (Part II, ch. IX) concludes that Army discipline depends on the annual renewal of the Army Act. Other experts, then and since, have disputed this, but the Liberal Cabinet believed it. And it implies that if His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition block the renewal of the Army Act, they will leave His Majesty without an army until their wishes are granted. Even if we do read the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty as purely formal, we are not out of the woods. For, as Bogdanor goes on to say, in 1920 Dicey and Rait set out the doctrine that Hart would later call self-embracing omnipotence. This concession empties the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, if it is to be treated as purely formal, of any content, because it acknowledges that Parliament can indeed, in a ‘not unmeaning’ way, claim to bind its successors. The Treaty and Acts of Union of 1706/7 embodied (as Dicey had already conceded, but then ignored, in 1885) a true treaty between two parliaments, only one of which had a tradition of parliamentary sovereignty. That treaty was then embodied in two Acts, one in the last Scottish Parliament and one in the last English Parliament. These three documents created a new Parliament. They (purport to) entrench constitutional protections, notably for the respective national churches of Scotland and England. The Scottish entrenchment, as recited and re-enacted in the English Act, states:

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And her Majesty with advice and consent aforesaid expressly provides and declares that the foresaid true Protestant religion contained in the above mentioned confession of faith with the form and purity of worship presently in use within this Church and its Presbyterian Church government and discipline (that is to say) the government of the Church by kirk sessions presbyteries provincial synods and general assemblies all established by the foresaid Acts of Parliament pursuant to the claim of right shall remain and continue unalterable and that the said Presbyterian government shall be the only government of the Church within the kingdom of Scotland.3

Dicey and Rait argue that the draftsmen of the Treaty and Acts ‘clearly believed in the possibility of creating an absolutely sovereign legislature which should yet be bound by unalterable laws’ (Dicey and Rait 1920: 253). Dicey thus has three doctrines of sovereignty. In 1885 (Dicey I) he endorses continuing omnipotence of Parliament. In 1913 (Dicey II) he expounds a form of popular sovereignty. In 1920 (Dicey III) he and Rait expound selfembracing omnipotence of Parliament. Two questions then follow for each of these doctrines. Is it a correct description of the actions of United Kingdom judges and legislators for (some of) the period since 1707? And is it an attractive (or at least a coherent) normative doctrine?

WHICH DOCTRINES ARE DEFENSIBLE? Recall that Hart states that in 1961 ‘the presently accepted rule is one of continuing sovereignty, so that Parliament cannot protect its statutes from repeal’. In 1712, after a Tory General Election victory, Parliament passed the Patronage Act (10 Anne, Chapter 12), which Dicey and Rait (1920: 280) call ‘the chief and almost the only example of an Act of the British Parliament passed in violation of the Act of Union’. The Act gave lay patrons the right to present ministers to Scottish parishes. It led to endless disputes and secessions in the Scottish churches, culminating in the Disruption of 1843 (for the best legal treatment of which see Rodger 2008), and was repealed in 1874. However, in stating that in 1961 the ‘presently accepted rule is one of continuing sovereignty’, Hart seems to have overlooked the Church of Scotland Act 1921 (10 & 11 Geo V. c.29). Parliament there bound itself to recognize the doctrines of the Church of Scotland (the ‘Declaratory Articles’, drafted by the Kirk and published as a schedule to the 1921 Act) as trumping attempts to override them. By s.1 of the Act:

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? The Declaratory Articles are lawful articles, and the constitution of the Church of Scotland in matters spiritual is as therein set forth, and no limitation of the liberty, rights and powers in matters spiritual therein set forth shall be derived from any statute or law affecting the Church of Scotland in matters spiritual at present in force, it being hereby declared that in all questions of construction the Declaratory Articles shall prevail, and that all such statutes and laws shall be construed in conformity therewith and in subordination thereto, and all such statutes and laws in so far as they are inconsistent with the Declaratory Articles are hereby repealed and declared to be of no effect.

The Parliament, thus, promised not to repeat what it had done in 1712. In 1921, as in 1707, the Parliament was willing to be bound by a form of words drafted not by itself but under the authority of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. It has shown no inclination to break these fetters. It is true that on its face the 1921 Act expressly repeals only past Acts inconsistent with the Declaratory Articles; unlike the Act of Union it does not attempt to entrench them against future legislation. Behaviourally this may be a distinction without a difference. The Declaratory Articles remain important in current litigation as defining the area of spiritual independence of the Church of Scotland. Where they draw that line was determined by the courts in 2005, in an important case to which we recur later. Before Hart, Lord President Cooper had attempted to subvert continuing omnipotence in MacCormick v. Lord Advocate, 1953 S.C. 395. MacCormick’s case (that the naming of Queen Elizabeth as Elizabeth II in Scotland was unlawful under the Act of Union) was dismissed. But Cooper continued: The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law. It derives its origin from Coke and Blackstone, and was widely popularised during the nineteenth century by Bagehot and Dicey, the latter having stated the doctrine in its classic form in his Law of the Constitution. Considering that the Union legislation extinguished the Parliaments of Scotland and England and replaced them by a new Parliament, I have difficulty in seeing why it should have been supposed that the new Parliament of Great Britain must inherit all the peculiar characteristics of the English Parliament but none of the Scottish Parliament, as if all that happened in 1707 was that Scottish representatives were admitted to the Parliament of England. That is not what was done. Further, the Treaty and the associated legislation, by which the Parliament of Great Britain was brought into being as the successor of the separate Parliaments of Scotland and England, contain some clauses which expressly reserve to the Parliament of Great Britain powers of subsequent modification, and other clauses which either contain no such power or emphatically exclude subsequent alteration by

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declarations that the provision shall be fundamental and unalterable in all time coming, or declarations of a like effect. I have never been able to understand how it is possible to reconcile with elementary canons of construction the adoption by the English constitutional theorists of the same attitude to these markedly different types of provisions (MacCormick v. Lord Advocate [1953] S.C. 396, 411).

It is true that Cooper’s remarks are what lawyers call ‘obiter’, i.e. in passing. They do not bind later judges. It has been suggested that Cooper felt safe to say these revolutionary things just because nothing hung on them: MacCormick had lost on other grounds. The Scottish courts have resisted any temptation to strike down UK Acts on Cooperian grounds. Nevertheless, Cooper’s attack on Dicey I seems unanswerable (see also MacCormick 1998). At least in relation to Scotland, Dicey I is neither descriptively correct nor normatively defensible. Undoubtedly, Cooper’s words were in the ears of those who drafted the Scottish Constitutional Convention’s Claim of Right in 1989: ‘We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention, do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs’ (Claim of Right 1989; my emphasis). One of the drafters of the Claim was Neil MacCormick, Regius Professor of Law at Edinburgh University and son of the petitioner in MacCormick v. Lord Advocate. MacCormick and his colleagues were pointedly claiming that in Scotland sovereignty rests with the people, not with Parliament (Maccormick 1998). This claim has not been tested in a court, but is in any case a normative claim as much as, or more than, a legal claim. Furthermore, since Hart wrote, a number of statutes have been seen as privileged. These include the European Communities Act 1972 and the three devolution statutes—to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—of 1998. In R. v. Secretary of State for Transport, ex parte Factortame Ltd and Others (No. 2) [1991] 1. A.C. 603, the Law Lords held that the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 was inconsistent with the 1972 and 1986 Acts governing the UK’s membership of the European Union—and that the later, not the earlier, Act should give way. Lord Bridge’s fig leaf is: If the supremacy within the European Community of Community law over the national law of member states was not always inherent in the E.E.C. Treaty (Cmnd 5179-II), it was certainly well established in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice long before the United Kingdom joined the Community. Thus, whatever limitation of its sovereignty Parliament accepted when it enacted the European Communities Act 1972 was entirely voluntary. . .[W]hen decisions of the European Court of Justice have exposed areas of United Kingdom statute law which failed to implement

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? Council directives, Parliament has always loyally accepted the obligation to make appropriate and prompt amendments (R. v. Secretary of State for Transport, ex parte Factortame Ltd and Others (No. 2) [1991] 1. A.C. 603 at 658–9).

The UK courts now hold that Parliament may bind its successors in certain respects. The recent Jackson judgment (R. (Jackson and others) v. Attorney General. [2006] 1 A.C. 262; see also Young 2006) reinforces this. In Jackson, which turned on the validity of the Parliament Act 1949 and thence on the exact meaning of the Parliament Act 1911, several of the judges joined in an opinion that the section of the 1911 Act which forbids the House of Commons from extending its life without Lords’ consent is itself entrenched. It could not, as the appellants in Jackson had claimed, be altered in two stages, first by amending the 1911 Act to remove that restriction and then by enacting a prolongation of Parliament, both without Lords’ consent. As to Parliamentary sovereignty, Lord Steyn said: We do not in the United Kingdom have an uncontrolled constitution as the Attorney General implausibly asserts. In the European context the second Factortame decision [1991] 1 AC 603 made that clear. The settlement contained in the Scotland Act 1998 also point[s] to a divided sovereignty. Moreover, the European Convention on Human Rights as incorporated into our law by the Human Rights Act 1998, created a new legal order. One must not assimilate the European Convention on Human Rights with multilateral treaties of the traditional type. Instead it is a legal order in which the United Kingdom assumes obligations to protect fundamental rights, not in relation to other states, but towards all individuals within its jurisdiction. The classic account given by Dicey of the doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament, pure and absolute as it was, can now be seen to be out of place in the modern United Kingdom (302).

And Lord Hope of Craighead (a Scottish judge) said: Step by step, gradually but surely, the English principle of the absolute legislative sovereignty of Parliament which Dicey derived from Coke and Blackstone is being qualified . . . It has been suggested that some of the provisions of the Acts of Union of 1707 (6 Anne c 11) (Scot c 7) are so fundamental that they lie beyond Parliament’s power to legislate. Lord President Cooper in MacCormick v Lord Advocate 1953 SC 396, 411, 412 reserved his opinion on the question whether the provisions in article XIX of the Treaty of Union which purport to preserve the Court of Session and the laws relating to private right which are administered in Scotland are fundamental law which Parliament is not free to alter. Nevertheless by expressing himself as he did he went further than Dicey, The Law of the Constitution, 10th edition (1959), page 82 was prepared to go when he said

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simply that it would be rash of Parliament to abolish Scots law courts and assimilate the law of Scotland to that of England (3034).

The Law Lords therefore (or at least some of them) are willing to accept that some statutes may be deemed to be entrenched and that to that extent parliamentary sovereignty is not absolute. The relevance of Factortame, the Act of Union, and human rights law to this claim are all discussed further in later chapters. What is it about a statute that gives it a claim to entrenchment? There seem to be three categories: 1. a statute that embodies an agreement previously reached in a treaty (e.g. the Acts of Union 1706/7; the European Communities Act 1972; and perhaps the Human Rights Act 1998); 2. a statute that (purports to) amend the rule of recognition for future statutes (e.g. the Parliament Act 1911); 3. a statute that has been endorsed by referendum (e.g. the Scotland Act 1998; Government of Wales Act 1998; Northern Ireland Act 1998). The Act of Union 1800, which Dicey held inviolable, does not qualify under any of those criteria. Although the Irish and British administrations agreed terms on which the Irish Parliament voted for its own abolition, that agreement was then dishonoured, because King George III ruled that widening Catholic civil rights violated his Coronation Oath. In his opposition to Irish Home Rule, Dicey could not argue by analogy from the 1706/7 Acts to that of 1800. That is perhaps why he formulated his arguments in terms of popular sovereignty. Unfortunately, as we have seen, they were extremely weak. He asserted both that the elected House of Commons did not represent the will of the people and that the unelected House of Lords could force an election to verify the will of the people. Dicey got George V to adopt his views. Prime Minister Asquith squashed them: The Parliament Act was not intended in any way to affect, and it is submitted has not affected, the Constitutional position of the Sovereign. It deals only with differences between the two Houses. When the two Houses are in agreement (as is always the case when there is a Conservative majority in the House of Commons), the Act is a dead letter. The demand . . . for a[n immediate] General Election . . . is open to objections of the most formidable character. (1) If such an election resulted in a majority for the Government, and the consequent passing of the Irish Bill next session, the recalcitrance of North-East Ulster would not in any way be affected. Sir E. Carson, and his friends have told the world, with obvious sincerity, that their objections to Home Rule have nothing

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? to do with the question whether it is approved or disapproved by the British electorate . . . (2) If such an election resulted in a Government defeat, the circumstances are such that neither in Ireland nor in Great Britain would it be accepted as a verdict adverse to Home Rule . . . .even when the bye-elections have gone against the Government, the attempt (wherever made) to arouse interest and resentment by pushing to the forefront the case against Home Rule and the supposed wrongs of Ulster, has met with no success. The General Election would be fought, as the bye-elections have been, not predominantly on Home Rule, but on the Insurance Act, the Marconi contract, and a score of other ‘issues’ which happened for the moment to preoccupy public attention. (3) The concession of the demand for a General Election, at this stage, would be in the teeth of the intentions of the Parliament Act. (Appendix to Chapter 12)

It is not difficult to construct a better argument than Dicey’s for popular sovereignty. In 1787, the United States Framers did exactly that, in setting the criteria for ratification (minimum of nine states) and amendment of the US Constitution into the Constitution itself. Several states had already had ratifying conventions for their state constitutions, and more would follow. The Commonwealth of Australia followed the same path a century later. Popular sovereignty has been an undercurrent of Scottish constitutionalism for a long time. It is implied, but not expressed, by Lord Cooper in MacCormick. For if the Parliament is not sovereign in Scotland, the people are. So said the Claim of Right and subsequent Scottish Constitutional Convention (1989). These were of course unofficial bodies, but the Scotland Act follows the recommendations of the Scottish Constitutional Convention. A constitutional statute which is subject to a referendum, as were all three of the devolution statutes in 1997/8, is a small step towards popular sovereignty. But it leaves open the question ‘Who are the people’? Dicey did not want the people of Ireland to vote in his proposed referendum on Irish Home Rule. But the people of England did not get a vote on the devolution statutes of the 1990s, which maybe they should have done. Popular sovereignty implies an elected legislature. Dicey’s claim that the elected Commons did not represent the people, but the unelected Lords did, was absurd. But no less absurd claims were made in the Commons and Lords debates on Lords reform in March 2007. An elected legislature is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for any claim that ultimate sovereignty lies with the people. The implications of this are the main theme of this book.

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7 Causes and Consequences of the Unionist Coup d’E´tat C AUS E S What then possessed the Unionists to assert so fervently between 1909 and 1914 that they, and not the elected government, represented the people? In relation to the Budget, the Unionist peers initially argued that as it had not been put to the people they were justified in resisting it. That argument, and the peers’ resistance, collapsed temporarily after the January 1910 election. But after the failure of the Unionist–Liberal talks in the summer and autumn of 1910 (for which see Jenkins 1968, ch. IX), it revived in full force. In Chapter 4, we showed that the Lords were still able to veto the land taxes proposed by the elected government’s chancellor. All the evidence of the last three chapters also shows that the Unionists and the king did not accept the legitimacy of the Parliament Act. To explain the first phase of the constitutional crisis (from Budget to Parliament Act), it is probably sufficient to fall back on the vulgar Marxism introduced earlier. The Budget and the Parliament Bill felt like threats to the vital interests of the landed class, and to a lesser degree those of the Church of England, whose own material interests were largely invested in land (Peterson and McLean 2007; on the landed interest more generally, Offer 1981; Adonis 1993). Karl Marx himself was as clear and eloquent on class in Britain as any subsequent Marxist. Explaining the 1852 election to readers in the United States, he wrote: Whigs, Free Traders and Peelites coalesced to oppose the Tories. It was between this coalition on one side, and the Tories on the other, that the real electoral battle was fought . . . Opposed to . . . entire official England, were the Chartists . . . The fatal year, 1846, with its repeal of the Corn Laws, and the shout of distress which this repeal forced from the Tories, proved that they were enthusiasts for nothing but the rent of land . . . The year 1846 brought to light in its nakedness the substantial class interest which forms

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the real base of the Tory party . . . They are distinguished from the other Bourgeois, in the same way as the rent of land is distinguished from commercial and industrial profit. Rent of land is conservative, profit is progressive; rent of land is national, profit is cosmopolitical; rent of land believes in the State church, profit is a dissenter by birth. The repeal of the Corn Laws of 1846 merely recognized an already accomplished fact, a change long since enacted in the elements of British civil society, viz., the subordination of the landed interest under the moneyed interest, of property under commerce, of agriculture under manufacturing industry, of the country under the city. Could this fact be doubted since the country population stands, in England, to the towns’ population in the proportion of one to three? (Marx 1852: 351–3).

For Marx, Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 marked the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the landed class. The proletariat, represented by the Chartists, were waiting in the wings. His analysis is brilliant but fatally undermined by his failure to think about the House of Lords and its veto. In 1846 the Lords, under the Duke of Wellington, withheld their veto over the revolutionary change in property rights introduced by Corn Law repeal. From the 1880s, under Lord Salisbury and his successors, the Lords became a much more active veto player on behalf of their class interest (Chapter 11). Salisbury knew when it was prudent to give in—for instance over the Irish Church in 1868 and over redistribution and electoral reform in 1884–5 (see, generally, Adonis 1993: ch. 5). His successors lacked his subtlety, hence the constitutional crisis. It is customary to say that the Lords ‘lost’ the constitutional battle in 1911. In one sense that is obviously true. But they won some battles in the class war; and in others, they staged a retreat so slow that the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the landed interest came not, as Marx believed, in 1846, but in 1918. In Chapter 4 we saw that that was true of land tax. The Lords had not resisted some measures of the ‘new liberalism’, notably the Trades Disputes Act 1906, which gave legal privileges to trade unions beyond anything the Chartists could have dreamt of. Nor did they resist whisky duties. Their resistance to ‘supertax’ (i.e. progressive income tax) was crushed by their overreach in 1909. But on the land and the church which (if we accept Marx’s analysis) was tied to the material interest of land, they continued to resist. The intended beneficiaries of Welsh disestablishment did not get their money until the 1940s, and then at a fraction of the rate intended in the Welsh Church Act 1914 (Peterson and Mclean 2007). Adonis (1993: ch. 4) also shows that from 1850 to 1914 the private bill procedure, which adjusted property rights in order to allow railways, tramways, and waterworks to be built, was tightly

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controlled by a succession of four Unionist peers who doughtily protected the private interests of existing real estate holders. But as we have seen, the coup d’e´tat came in the final phase of the Lords’ resistance, over Ireland. Why were the Unionists so passionate about Ireland? A Marxist answer takes us some of the way: Irish landowners were disproportionately represented among Unionist peers. However, this explanation does not get us far for two reasons: (a) Salisbury realized, for reasons of public order, that the Liberals’ Irish Land Bill of 1881 was one where the Tory peers must abandon their protection of landed property rights (Adonis 1993: 128); (b) although Southern Irish landlords (especially Lords Lansdowne and Midleton) remained powerful in the Unionist leadership in the Lords through the coup d’e´tat, their material interest had been largely extinguished by the Unionists’ own Irish Land Act of 1903. As we saw above, the coup d’e´tat was staged on behalf of (largely Presbyterian) Ulster Protestants, not of Church of Ireland Ascendancy landowners. The roots of the coup d’e´tat therefore lie in empire and (rather oddly) an appeal to the people. As to empire, Salisbury told the Lords in 1889: ‘We are engaged upon an enterprise of momentous importance, that of keeping unimpaired the unity of an Empire which has never been divided yet’ (speech in Lords, 21.02.89, quoted by Adonis 1993: 129: Salisbury seems to have overlooked American independence). Irish nationalism must be resisted because if Ireland broke away, who knows where might be next? The new colonies and protectorates in the tropics that were being rapidly added to the empire? The Boer colonies in South Africa? Above all, the jewel in the crown, India? Imperialism was widely popular because it provided jobs for Britons in many different parts of the class structure. Younger sons of peers could go out and govern New South Wales, or serve abroad in the British or Indian Army. Professionals excluded from the UK hierarchy, perhaps because they were not Oxford or Cambridge graduates, had vast opportunities in the Empire, for instance as doctors, administrators, railway and marine engineers. Scots were particularly prominent in this stratum. The Empire also offered emigration opportunities for the working class. Numerous studies have tracked the popular support for imperialism in this period (cf. McKenzie and Silver 1968; Powell 1977; Pugh 1985). The dark side of Empire was contempt for ‘the lesser breeds without the Law’, as Rudyard Kipling called them. By that phrase Kipling did not actually mean black Africans and Asians. He meant inferior Europeans. The inferior Europeans closest at hand were the Irish—the majority Irish that is, namely the Catholic, mostly rural, population devastated in the famine of the 1840s

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and then spread about the cities of Britain and America. Lord Salisbury compared Irish people to Hottentots1 (Cecil 1921, vol. 3: 302; for the context see Chapter 11). Dicey (1886: 89–90) stated that the English were ripe for Protestantism at a time when the people of Ireland had hardly risen to the level of Roman Catholicism.

For Salisbury and Dicey, as for many others, the Irish (and Catholicism) were lower on the evolutionary ladder than the English (and Protestantism). ‘Paddy’ was a stereotype beloved of ‘Mr Punch’ and other cartoonists (Foster 1995). The Protestant Irish, on the other hand, were regarded as ‘grim, dogged, determined “ghazis” with good leaders and a certain amount of discipline’, in the words of George V’s equerry in 1914 (Chapter 12). Add this to the referendal concept of democracy being advanced by Dicey (Chapter 6) and Salisbury (Chapter 11) and you get the two versions of the ideology which drove the 1914 coup.  Version 1: The Liberal Government is riding roughshod over the people and has refused to put its policy before them. Therefore, the people are entitled to resist.  Version 2: The people of Ulster are being denied a say in something that vitally affects them. The difficulty with Version 1 is that when Unionists counted the people, the people of Ireland did not count. The difficulty with Version 2 is that when Unionists counted the people of Ulster, the Nationalist people of Ulster did not count. We have already given examples of this myopia: here are a few more. In 1912, Bonar Law told a Catholic correspondent that ‘the population there [in Ulster] is homogeneous’ (Law to Lady N. Crichton Stuart, 10.07.1912, quoted by Blake 1955: 126). Table 5.4 was compiled from the 1911 census and was published by a commercial map-maker, and was therefore available to all at the time. The copy we use is itself a historic document. It is the copy on which Secretary of War Seely scribbled the names and locations of the arms dumps he asked Sir Arthur Paget to order the army to protect (Chapter 5). Seely knew which dumps were in Protestant, and which in Catholic, territory (copy in Mottistone Papers, Nuffield College, Oxford). Table 5.4 shows that Irish nationalists were simply invisible to Unionist eyes. Dicey stated that, as an ‘old Benthamite’, he put the welfare of the 40 million British ahead of that of the 3 million nationalist Irish (Dicey 1913, p. ix). He did not want the nationalist Irish to have a vote in the referendum he was demanding. And yet, Unionists insisted, they must forever

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remain citizens of the United Kingdom. Dicey’s theory of popular sovereignty fails. Dicey’s equally eminent colleague Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, and author of those constitutional textbooks of the day not written by Dicey, was a former Liberal candidate who had become a Liberal Unionist. His Version 2 statement similarly shows complete unawareness of the data in Table 5.4. Writing to The Times after the Curragh, he says: A body of good and loyal citizens find that they are about to be driven outside the pale of the Constitution . . . If the Covenanters meet [that] with armed resistance, I for one believe, with a conviction which no results of a Referendum or a General Election can alter, that they are justified in their resistance. . . .[T]he cession of Ulster to the Nationalists . . . in face of the determined opposition of the men who have made the prosperity of Ulster, is an outrage which takes us outside the accustomed bounds of political obligation . . . Ministers know that the passing of the Home Rule Bill will be the equivalent of a declaration of war (Anson 1914; my emphasis).

Anson, at the time MP for Oxford University and tutor on the constitution to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), is thus even more extreme than Dicey or Law. For him, the right of Ulster Protestants to rebel trumps any referendum in the United Kingdom as a whole, or election majority. Versions 1 and 2 of the coup ideology were inconsistent. One problem with Dicey’s (or anybody else’s) referendum is: in what territory? After the Curragh, the king’s secretary, Lord Stamfordham, wrote helpfully to Bonar Law: If the Govt will not have referendum on the liberal terms you offered— could you not press for exclusion of 6 counties without referendum—(by these means you wd avoid certain zones) and for an unlimited period—and increase the subsidy from the English treasury to say 5 millions. Worth the money! (Stamfordham to Bonar Law, 22.03.14. Parliamentary Archives, Bonar Law MSS 72/1/65).

The constitutional implications of a letter from the King’s secretary to the leader of the Opposition, advising him how best to resist His Majesty’s Government, are interesting. This practical suggestion from one fervent Unionist to another presages what happened. The six counties of Northern Ireland were indeed excluded from the rest of Ireland without a referendum. The subsidy from the British Treasury has continued to flow. And ‘certain zones’ were avoided. By that delicate phrase, Stamfordham probably means the nationalist districts within Northern Ireland, especially in Fermanagh, Tyrone, Derry City, west Belfast, and southern Armagh, which would have inconveniently voted the wrong way in any referendum.

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The Unionist theory of popular sovereignty thus had the following flaws: 1. It ignored the fact that the electorate had voted three times in a row for the Home Rule coalition, at least the second and third times in the full knowledge that voting for it would lead to a Home Rule Bill. 2. It ignored the one representative argument that was readily to hand: namely that Ireland was malapportioned. The number of seats assigned to Ireland was left at 105 in 1884–5, presumably because neither Gladstone nor Salisbury wanted to incur Irish wrath.2 Boundaries within Ireland had not been redrawn since 1885; Ireland as a whole was now overrepresented. The population of Catholic Ireland was declining, at least relatively: whereas that of Protestant Ireland was increasing. Furthermore, the Protestant population was inefficiently lumped (from the point of view of maximizing seats). Unionists held their seats by huge majorities; Nationalists by smaller ones (Table 5.4).Therefore, Nationalists held a majority of seats in Ulster. 3. It assumed, without evidence, that ‘the people’ would vote down Home Rule in a referendum; and that they would vote Unionist in a General Election. There is no evidence to support either hypothesis in the trend of by-election results. The Unionists had done well in 1911 and 1912 (as Oppositions usually do in mid-term); but as the date for the general election that was due by autumn 1915 at latest approached, the parties were back where they had been in December 1910 (see Table 11.1). 4. It was unclear as to which people should vote in any such referendum. (a) The people of the whole United Kingdom? (b) The people of Great Britain? (c) The people of Ireland? (d) The people of Ulster? (e) The people of predominantly Protestant Ulster? (f ) The people of predominantly Catholic Ulster? How groups (a) and (b) would have voted is unknown, but there is no convincing evidence that they would have rejected Home Rule. They had voted three times in a row for a pro-Home Rule coalition of parties. Group (c) would have overwhelmingly supported it. Group (d) would have narrowly rejected it. Group (e) would have overwhelmingly rejected it. Group (f ) would have overwhelmingly supported it. A non-contradictory theory of popular sovereignty therefore requires at least that the legislature be elected and that the coalition which can command a majority there is entitled to have its programme enacted until the next general election. It may also involve the referendum, but who should vote in such a referendum is not always clear. These remain current issues, as we shall see.

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It is worth starting with the fact that the Unionists’ attempted coup d’e´tat has rarely been recognized as such (Bayly 2000). And yet, Sir Henry Wilson, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, told the Ulster Protestant paramilitaries where British troops were about to be deployed against them. It is certain that Bonar Law, the Leader of the Opposition, encouraged the paramilitary revolt; it is likely, although not certain, that he was complicit in financing it (Jackson [2003: 133, 327]; Appendix to Chapter 5). The most surprising fact about this evidence is how little it seems to have upset the conventional narrative of the wisdom, flexibility, etc., of the unwritten British Constitution. Two successive kings imposed conditions on their Liberal Governments that helped to force elections which the Unionists might have won. The second king apparently came close to either dismissing the Liberal Government or refusing Royal Assent to the Government of Ireland Act in 1913–14. By comparison, the behaviour of Sir George Murray in 1908–9 is relatively mild. The Unionists’ inconsistent demands simultaneously to treat Ireland as an indissoluble part of the Union and to ignore the votes of Ireland’s elected MPs led to the coup d’e´tat attempt of 1914. George V, Bonar Law, Sir Henry Wilson, and even Sir George Murray may not have viewed their conduct as an attempt to unseat the elected government without recourse to an election: but such it undoubtedly was. If the Irish Party was invisible to Unionists, they could discount the mere parliamentary majority against them. Hence the sudden increase in the number of veto players in British politics from 1906 to 1914. But one looks in vain for any sign of surprise in much of the modern historical literature, let alone in most of the few political scientists and constitutional lawyers who consider these events. Because the best-known statement of the gravity of the constitutional crisis is shrill and unbalanced (Dangerfield 1936; but cf. Ensor 1936: 473–9), the idea that either there was no crisis or that if there was one it was provoked by the Liberals has gained ground by default. Bogdanor (1995: 309), in his text on the UK monarchy, concludes that the United Kingdom is one of ‘a small number of favoured nations’ in which constitutional monarchy ‘far from undermining democracy . . . serves to sustain and strengthen democratic institutions’. It is hard to see how he reaches this conclusion in the face of his copious evidence about (especially) George V and his advisers between 1910 and 1914. From the same evidence base I reach opposite conclusions.

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This myopia arises from failure to understand how sharply the veto game of British politics changed for the period this chapter discusses. Historians, and some political scientists, have failed to appreciate that the Irish Party was a partisan veto player for the periods stated (and that the Labour Party never was until 1923). The institutional veto plays of the Lords have been underestimated, partly because detailed evidence has not been understood in a veto game context (e.g., that the threat of their veto forced the 1909 Budget to be written in an impracticable way), partly because the range of policies that Liberal Governments did not even try to implement before 1911 is not fully considered. (Think about Welsh disestablishment, which an overwhelming majority of MPs for Wales had been demanding since 1868). The institutional veto plays of successive monarchs have been inexplicably understated, despite the ample evidence of them that this book draws on. Did the veto game structure affect the winset of the status quo in British politics? Yes, profoundly, and in ways which remain to be mapped carefully although historians have been writing about them for centuries. As a first rough structure we suggest the following (for England only). Until 1640 the monarch was the unique domestic veto player. From 1640 to 1689 a ‘long revolution’ occurred. During those years of civil war, restoration, and deposition of James II, it was established (so all constitutional actors believed) that the monarch was no longer an institutional veto player. Each House of Parliament was a full veto player except on financial matters, where the House of Commons was the unique institutional veto player. The pattern of partisan veto players depended on party structure in the Commons. Party structure in the Lords was invariant after about 1815. The Lords were always Conservative, but successive Conservative leaders in the Lords could decide to use or withhold their veto power (Chapter 11). The crisis of 1909–11 shook these beliefs. It is normal to say that after 1911 it was established that the House of Commons was the unique institutional veto player. But this statement needs qualification. First of all, the leaders of the Opposition, the king, and the House of Lords did not accept this from 1911 to 1914. Secondly, except in the last year or two of a Parliament, the House of Lords retains its practical veto on non-financial matters. This suggests a stable core to British politics throughout the long nineteenth century, given that the optima of the median peer and the median MP would not be particularly close. The House of Lords was by construction almost exclusively a landed house. The House of Commons contained representatives of capital—especially finance capital but later also industrial capital—from the eighteenth century. Representatives of Labour never joined a governing coalition directly until 1915, although sometimes (as with the Trades Disputes Act 1906) the representatives of land and capital would

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combine to enact a pro-Labour measure for electoral reasons or reasons of preserving social order. Apart from such concessions, the ‘contract line’, as game theorists call it, for policy embraced the points acceptable to the median representative of land and the median representative of capital. That modern Marxist story explains why Marx was wrong about 1846. From 1914 to 1999 the influence of land did not simply vanish. It stalled the redistribution enacted by the Welsh disestablishment bill for three decades. It continued to block land taxation and serious discussion of church establishment. However, the main consequence of the coup d’e´tat was for Ireland, and especially Northern Ireland. Probably, neither the Commons nor the Lords realized at the time of their bargaining in 1911 what effects 2.(4) of the Act as enacted would have: (4) A Bill shall be deemed to be the same Bill as a former Bill sent up to the House of Lords in the preceding session if, when it is sent up to the House of Lords, it is identical with the former Bill or contains only such alterations as are certified by the Speaker of the House of Commons to be necessary owing to the time which has elapsed since the date of the former Bill, or to represent any amendments which have been made by the House of Lords in the former Bill in the preceding session. (Parliament Act 1911 2(4))

The subsection has a proviso that amendments can nevertheless be made if the Lords agree to them. But in the Home Rule bargaining game of 1912–14, this proviso was irrelevant. The Lords had an incentive to oppose rather than to amend the bill each time they encountered it. They did. This ensured that the bill, when finally enacted in spring 1914, would be as bad as it possibly could be (from the median Lord’s standpoint). The median Lord wanted the Act to be as bad as it possibly could, so that he could say that it coerced Ulster, had not been submitted to the people, violated the Constitution, and did all the other terrible things that we have copiously documented them as saying. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, Asquith and colleagues should have included some opt-out for Protestant Ulster when they introduced the bill in 1912. The Liberal backbencher Thomas Agar-Robartes proposed an opt-out for the four most Protestant counties when the bill had its first run through the Commons (Jackson 2003: 122). Of course that would have led to a furious row with the pivotal Irish Party, which would nevertheless have accepted a Home Rule Bill with an opt-out rather than no Home Rule Bill. In 1912, however, Asquith and colleagues did not know that the new leadership of the Opposition would be willing to threaten a paramilitary coup against the Bill. Sheer convenience may have driven them to reject the Agar–Robartes Amendment. For instance, the bill already required revenue collection to be split between Britain and Ireland. Splitting it three ways would have increased

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the transaction costs of Home Rule still more. Section 2(4) of the Parliament Act locked them into submitting an identical bill to the Lords three times, even when it had become obvious that its failure to allow Protestant Ulster an opt-out was likely to lead to paramilitary resistance. This suited the Opposition and (at least in the short run) the Ulster Protestants. It did not suit the peace and good government of Ireland. I roundly reject the claim that the tragedy was largely or even substantially the fault of Asquith’s myopia (see e.g. Jalland 1980). During and after the First World War, the Irish Party collapsed in favour of Sinn Fein, which promised to boycott the Westminster Parliament and declare itself the provisional government of Ireland. There were numerous reasons for this switch, including the bloody suppression of the Easter Rising in 1916 and the attempt to extend conscription to Ireland in 1918. But the failure of the Irish Party to get by constitutional means the object for which it had been formed, after returning huge nationalist majorities to Westminster in every Parliament since 1885, undoubtedly contributed. As Asquith told George V in response to the latter’s complaints about likely disorder in Ulster: On the other hand, if the Bill is rejected or indefinitely postponed, or some inadequate and disappointing substitute put forward in its place, the prospect is, in my opinion, much more grave. The attainment of Home Rule has for more than 30 years been the political (as distinguished from the agrarian) ideal of four-fifths of the Irish people. Whatever happens in other parts of the United Kingdom, at successive general elections, the Irish representation in Parliament never varies. For the last 8 years they have had with them a substantial majority of the elected representatives of Great Britain. The Parliament of 1906 was debarred by election pledges from dealing with the matter legislatively, but during its lifetime, in 1908, the House of Commons affirmed by an overwhelming majority a resolution in favour of the principle. In the present Parliament, the Government of Ireland Bill has passed that House in two successive sessions, with British majorities which showed no sign of diminution from first to last. If it had been taken up by a Conservative Government, it would more than a year ago have been the law of the land. It is the confident expectation of the vast bulk of the Irish people that it will become law next year. If the ship, after so many stormy voyages, were now to be wrecked in sight of port, it is difficult to overrate the shock, or its consequences. They would extend into every department of political, social, agrarian and domestic life. It is not too much to say that Ireland would become ungovernable—unless by the application of forces and methods which would offend the conscience of Great Britain, and arouse the deepest resentment in all the self-governing Dominions of the Crown. (Appendix to Chapter 12)

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Asquith’s prediction was borne out to the letter between 1918 and 1921. The Sinn Fein members elected in the UK General Election of 1918 refused to take their seats, but constituted themselves as the First Dail of (what became) the Irish Free State. Three years of guerrilla war, which had exactly the reputational consequences for Britain that Asquith had predicted, led to a truce in summer 1921 and a treaty in December of that year (McLean 2001a: chapter 7). The treaty was ratified in both countries and the Irish Free State came into existence, without the six counties of present-day Northern Ireland. However, the large minority of the Second Dail who did not accept the Treaty terms rebelled, and a civil war ensued, won by the pro-Treaty faction. Meanwhile the British Coalition government had drafted what became the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Prime Minister Lloyd George, by this time more or less a prisoner of the Unionists who held an absolute majority of seats in the Commons (and with no Irish allies left in the House), allowed the Unionists, in the shape of Walter Long, to draft the bill. Long had certainly been complicit in the Larne gun-running (unless Crawford was a complete fantasist): but for that very reason, he could prevent a Unionist revolt in either house of Parliament over the terms of the bill. The Government of Ireland Act (1920 c.67) provided for a Parliament for each of Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland, with a Council of Ireland overarching them. However, as in 1918, the Sinn Fein members elected to the Parliament of Southern Ireland refused to take their seats there, and constituted themselves as the Second Dail. The Council of Ireland also fell, leaving only Northern Ireland with that Home Rule that Carson and Crawford had brought 30,000 rifles to Larne to resist. Northern Ireland was temporarily defined to comprise the six north-eastern counties of Ireland, four of which were majority Protestant and two of which (Fermanagh and Tyrone) were majority Catholic. The three most Catholic counties of pre-1920 Ulster, namely, Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal (Table 5.4) were assigned to Southern Ireland and became part of the Irish Free State (since 1949 the Republic of Ireland). An essential part of Lloyd George’s game plan to get the treaty through three parliaments and three executives, in none of which he controlled a majority, was a Boundary Commission (McLean 2001a: chapter 7). Irish negotiators understood it to be a body that would squeeze the Protestant North to a size that would become economically unviable and force it to come into the Free State. Ulster Unionists understood it to be a body which protected the integrity of Northern Ireland. When the Commission reported in 1925, it was much closer to the Unionist than to the Free State expectations. It would have moved (on 1911 Census figures) 31,319 people from Northern Ireland to the Free State, and 7,594 the other way. It would have moved 32,673 people the ‘right’ way (Catholics into the Free State plus non-Catholics out of

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it), and 6,240 people the ‘wrong’ way (Catholics into Northern Ireland plus non-Catholics out of it). (Hand 1969, my calculations from tables in text). However, before the report was published, its Unionist member had leaked it to the hard-right Morning Post. This led to the resignation of the Free State member, and to the later agreement of all parties to leave the boundary as defined in the 1920 Act and to suppress the report, which was not published until 1969 (Hand 1969; Blake 1995). The leak to the Morning Post led to a strategic difference among Ulster Unionists. The leaker, J. R. Fisher, had seen the boundary in military terms: With North Monaghan in Ulster and South Armagh out, we should have a solid ethnographic and strategic frontier to the South, and a hostile ‘Afghanistan’ on our north-west frontier [i.e., Co. Donegal] would be placed in safe keeping. (Fisher 1922, in Gwynn 1950: 215–6; stress in original)

The leakee, James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, saw it in primordial terms: ‘no surrender’, which had been the slogan of militant Ulster Protestantism since 1689. Craig won the intra-Unionist argument, though Fisher had been more perceptive. South Armagh has always been (from an Ulster Protestant perspective) the most troublesome part of Northern Ireland and the heartland of paramilitary republicanism. When Michael Collins, one of the Irish delegation at the Treaty talks, noted of his conversation with Lloyd George that the latter ‘remarked that I myself pointed out on a previous occasion that the North would be forced economically to come in’, he was half right.3 If Northern Ireland had been reduced to its Protestant core and if it had been fiscally responsible in the way envisaged in all four Home Rule statutes, it would probably have been fiscally unviable. Neither condition applied. The 1920 Act assigned the revenue from most tax collected in Ireland to the Irish governments (s.22). It followed all its predecessors in envisaging that (Northern) Ireland would then pay back an ‘imperial contribution’ to the UK Treasury as its contribution to paying for reserved services. These arrangements never worked. Northern Ireland’s assigned tax receipts never covered even the cost of local services. The ‘imperial contribution’ flowed the other way, from HM Treasury to Northern Ireland (Mitchell 2006). It kept Northern Ireland in the Empire. Whatever might be the right fiscal arrangements for devolution (to be discussed below), the 1920 Act did not get them right: presumably, therefore, neither would the 1886, 1893, or 1912 provisions if they had been brought into force. What was the human cost of the Unionist coup d’e´tat? That is unknowable. We do not know how much blood would have been shed in Ulster if the 1914 Act had proceeded unhindered by the First World War, and/or if an opt-out for Protestant Ulster had been negotiated. We do know how much blood was

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shed in the Anglo–Irish guerrilla war between 1918 and 1921; and in Northern Ireland and elsewhere as a result of paramilitary violence and state response to it between 1968 and 1998. The death toll in the first has been estimated at about 1,400; in the second, at 3,524 for the years 1969–2001 (Hopkinson 2002; data compiled by Malcolm Sutton at http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/ sutton/tables/Year.html). We also know that in 1930 George V said to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald: What fools we were not to have accepted Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. The empire now would not have had the Irish Free state giving us so much trouble and pulling us to pieces. (Rose 1983: 240)

Part III The Erosion of Diceyan Ideology

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8 The Impact of UK Devolution This chapter is not a history of devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom. Millions of words have been written about that, some of them by me with co-authors (especially McLean and McMillan 2005). Rather, it aims to explain why devolution has occurred, and what that implies for the traditional constitution of the United Kingdom.

SCOTLAND: A DIGESTED HISTORY, DIGESTED The settlement of 1707 was successively unpopular, popular, ignored, and questioned. As noted above, it was wildly unpopular at enactment, if the riots and petitions are anything to go by. There were three Jacobite rebellions in 1708, 1715, and 1745–6. The second and third of these led to the last pitched battles on the British soil. On the other side, the Union was equally unpopular with strict Presbyterians. But as the two groups opposed to Union had nothing in common with one another, the Union survived. The Jacobites could win or draw a battle (Sheriffmuir in 1715; Prestonpans in 1745), but not a war. Bonnie Prince Charlie set up his court in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. After Prestonpans he invaded England, but fizzled out at Derby, not noted for either its Jacobites or its Presbyterians. Within twenty years Scotland had experienced the huge economic, social, and cultural surge known as the Scottish Enlightenment. It has spread its tentacles all over the world, as detailed in various places in this book. The integration of the Scottish economy with England’s produced far bigger advantages, per head, to the Scots than to the English. By opening the British Empire to them it created jobs, above all, for those trained in skills and professions where Scots training was better than English. Scots doctors, engineers (both graduates and technicians), Presbyterian ministers, and people who, if they had not been barred by religion or lack of cash, might have

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gone to Oxford or Cambridge,1 sustained both the general staff and the NCOs of the British Empire. As for Presbyterian suspicion of Union, Scots who cared about church and state could get angry, with good reason, at the way the main Scottish churches were treated by the UK Parliament and the Law Lords. In 1904 the Law Lords handed the property of about 1,100 ministers and parishes of the United Free Church to a splinter group of about 24 ministers, on the grounds that the latter’s theology was sounder (Rodger 2008: 98–108). However, Scots not concerned about church and state were untroubled. The settlement of 1921–25 removed church and state as a ground for Scottish devolution. The decline of the British Empire also did not immediately lead to demands for devolution. Rather, the rise of the Labour Party and the collapse of the capital-goods industries of the Empire such as shipbuilding and locomotive construction, between 1931 and 1960, threw attention on the United Kingdom as a social insurance device. However inadequate the dole, it was more than an independent Scotland could have afforded. The same was true of the collapse of the coal industry in Wales and of shipbuilding in Northern Ireland. When unemployment is structural rather than (or as well as) cyclical, then social insurance can damp the shock in the worst-affected areas. Imbued in the politics of industry, depression, unemployment, and social welfare, the Labour Party had abandoned its Home Rule origins in both Scotland and Wales by 1929. It did not return until 1974, and then for very different reasons. The Conservatives were the party of what we have called ‘primordial Unionism’ (McLean and McMillan 2005: 122–34). The Union was to be upheld because it was there. Officially named the Conservative and Unionist Party until recently, in Scotland it was in fact the Unionist Party pure and simple for many decades. The Union in question was that with Ireland, not with Scotland; but unionism was a general principle. If you let Ireland go, which part of the Empire would go next? Canada? India? Scotland? Administrative and some financial devolution to Scotland dates back to the 1880s, as a by-product of attempts to keep Ireland in the Union (for a comprehensive history see Mitchell 2003). Administrative devolution meant that all the main functions of government in Scotland, except social protection, have been run from Scotland, by Scottish civil servants as part of a unified Civil Service across Great Britain.2 Financial devolution means that many of those functions are financed out of general UK-wide taxation, from the proceeds of which a block grant is made over to the Scottish civil service. In the years of administrative devolution, both Scotland and (Northern) Ireland have done very well. In previous writing I have argued that this arises from the credible threat that Scotland and Ireland (later Northern Ireland)

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pose to the Union. When there was any threat to their generous public spending, the relevant Secretary of State could always argue in Cabinet that any cut would fuel nationalist resentment and imperil the Union. Hence the block grant has in recent years given Scotland and Northern Ireland (but not Wales) more to spend per head than an assessment of relative needs would give them. Perhaps because that is common knowledge in the world of public finance (although it is not often shared with the Scottish electorate), there has only been one interdepartmental needs assessment in modern times (HM Treasury 1979; McLean, Lodge, and Schmuecker 2008). The Scottish National Party (SNP) dates back to 1928 (McLean 1969). In its early decades it expounded cultural rather than economic nationalism. It won a parliamentary by-election in 1945, during the wartime truce between the main parties, but promptly lost the seat again at the 1945 general election. It first became electorally competitive in the mid-1960s, when the Wilson Labour government of 1964–70 encountered deep political and economic difficulty. It subsided in 1970, winning just one seat in that year’s general election. But the discovery of oil in the North Sea then enabled the SNP to claim, as it has ever since, that It’s Scotland’s oil. For the first time that gave it a credibility beyond the ranks of cultural nationalists and the temporarily disgruntled. Elsewhere (e.g. in McLean and McMillan 2005, Chapter 7) we have told the story of the shotgun conversion of the Labour Party to devolution in the summer of 1974. Misreading opinion polls to say that the Scots wanted independence or devolution (read more carefully, they show that if offered more public spending the Scots would accept it), Wilson forced the unwilling Scottish Labour Party to say that it wanted devolution. There was no devolution in the Labour Party itself. The Conservatives also flirted with devolution, from 1968 to 1979. The SNP reached its Westminster high-water mark in the general election of October 1974, when it beat the Conservatives into third place, winning 30 per cent of the Scottish vote. Because its vote was evenly distributed around Scotland this translated into only 11 of the 72 Scottish seats (15 per cent). This even distribution, as was common knowledge, would turn from curse to blessing if their vote advanced only a few percentage points. At about 35 per cent of the vote, the SNP would win a majority of seats in Scotland under the first-past-the-post electoral system for the UK Parliament. It would then be in a position to open talks on independence. The Wilson (later Callaghan) Labour government of 1974–9 therefore made a devolution scheme for Scotland and Wales its flagship policy. Flagships are especially vulnerable to enemy fire. This one sank in February 1977, victim of a ‘Geordie revolt’. Labour MPs from the north-east of England complained that devolution would only further entrench Scotland’s spending advantage, compared

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to their region which was as poor as Scotland but received considerably less public expenditure per head.3 Labour proceeded with separate referenda on devolution for Scotland and Wales. In Wales the proposal was heavily defeated; in Scotland it narrowly passed but Labour were unable to implement it because of another backbench revolt. However the SNP, after peaking in 1975, had sunk again in the polls. In March 1979 the Callaghan government lost a confidence vote on the collapse of its policy. In the ensuing general election, Margaret Thatcher, described by a colleague as ‘the most Unionist politician in Downing Street since the war’ (Young 1990: 465) swept to power, and immediately ditched Scottish devolution. And nothing happened. There were no riots in the streets of Edinburgh. It seemed that the demand for devolution had been broad but not deep. Not till after Margaret Thatcher’s third successive general election victory in 1987 did the devolutionist forces stir in Scotland. Rather suddenly, they noticed that a Government which held only ten seats in Scotland—one fewer than the SNP had won in October 1974—could implement deeply unpopular policies there, such as the poll tax, which was piloted in Scotland a year ahead of England and Wales. When devolution revived in 1988–9 it was in the hands of cultural nationalists. They called their manifesto, significantly, a Claim of Right. This title had more resonance than most people noticed. In 1689 the Scottish Parliament had enacted a Claim of Right Act deposing James VII in favour of William III. It stated in the preamble: Wheras King James the Seventh . . . Did By the advyce of wicked and evill Counsellers Invade the fundamentall Constitution of this Kingdome And altered it from a legall limited monarchy to ane Arbitrary Despotick power.

As part of the contract to make William the Parliament-chosen monarch of Scotland, the Act goes on to list certain basic civil liberties. Announcing that William and his wife Mary had promised to honour those civil liberties, the Act continues: Haveing therfor ane entire confidence that his said Majesty the King of England will perfect the Delyverance so far advanced by him and will still preserve them from violation of their Rights which they have here asserted and from all other attempts upon their Religion lawes and liberties, The said Estates of the Kingdome of Scotland Doe resolve that William and Mary King and Queen of England France and Ireland Be and be Declared King and Queen of Scotland (Claim of Right Act 1689, at http:// www.rahbarnes.demon.co.uk/clai1689.htm).

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As with the English Convention Parliaments of 1660 and 1689, and the US Constitutional Convention of 1787, the constitutional status of the Convention Parliament which enacted the Claim of Right is itself unclear. It purported to legitimate itself by saying that James VII had never taken the required oath. But the plain political fact was that it had deposed one king and invited another to take office on terms it laid down, which the incoming king agreed.4 In whose name did these revolutionary conventions act? The Americans were unambiguous, choosing the wording ‘We the people of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution’. In both England and Scotland the idea that Parliament was acting for the People was in the air; in neither was it explicit. In England, the dangerous radicalism of Thomas Rainborough was associated with the regime that the Convention of 1660 was called to abolish. John Locke developed the doctrine that the king governed by the consent of the people, which James II (VII) had forfeited. But he did not publish that doctrine until 1690. So the English did not use Putney (Rainborough) language in 1689 either. Therefore, the Scots came closer than the English, in 1689, to stating that they were acting in the name of the people. In their covering letter to William asking him to accept the crown of Scotland on the terms offered, the Scottish Convention Parliament referred to the ‘petition or claim of right of the subjects of this Kingdom’. Three centuries later, the promoters of the new Claim of Right were unambiguous. ‘We acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs’, they said. The Claim of Right served as the preamble to the report of the Scottish Constitutional Convention. This convention was a private initiative supported by the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties in Scotland, various civil society organizations and churches. Its chair was an Episcopal clergyman. The Conservatives and Scottish Nationalists stayed out. Nevertheless, the constitution drafted by the Convention became, with few alterations, the Scotland Act 1998 after a two-pronged referendum of 1997. In this referendum, the Scottish electorate voted strongly for an elected parliament and (by a smaller margin) for it to have powers to tax. Donald Dewar, who became Scotland’s first First Minister, repeated a phrase from John Smith (Tony Blair’s predecessor as UK Labour leader) when he described a Scottish Parliament as ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. The Scotland Act does some things well and some things badly. On the whole, the things that the Constitutional Convention discussed have turned out well. The Scottish Parliament has more open and inclusive procedures than Westminster. It has enacted some things that were long overdue, including the abolition of the feudal system in Scotland and general access to unenclosed moors and mountains. These may overshadow the Parliament’s

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timidity in the face of cultural conservatives over the abolition of a ban on ‘promoting homosexuality’ in schools, and over the institution of civil partnerships. The latter were among the surprisingly many devolved matters which the Parliament has remitted back for Westminster to deal with, under what has become known as the ‘Sewel Convention’.5 The day-to-day operations of the Parliament are explained, and the differences from Westminster noted, in Calman (2008). The weakest parts of the Scottish devolution settlement are the parts the Constitutional Convention did not consider. These are representation and finance. How many MPs from Scotland should continue to sit in the UK Parliament? What powers should they have? What should a government do about the anomaly that Scottish MPs may vote on English matters which are devolved in Scotland, such as top-up fees at English universities? This conundrum is now known as the ‘West Lothian Question’. The Scottish Parliament is essentially financed by block grant from UK tax receipts, under what has become known as the ‘Barnett Formula’. Its supposed inventor, the former Labour minister Lord (Joel) Barnett, was formerly proud of the fame it brought him, but has recently become a fierce critic, one of many. As finance and representation are headaches for the relations between the United Kingdom and all three devolved territories, we consider them in a separate, later, section of this chapter. The first two Scottish Parliaments (1999–2003 and 2003–07) were governed by coalition Labour-Liberal Democrat administrations. The third (2007–11) is governed by a minority Scottish National Party administration. It retains a Unionist majority, and in 2008 the three main Unionist parties in the Parliament (Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat) combined to set up the (Calman) Commission on the future of Scottish devolution. To date, it has produced an interim report (Calman 2008), as has the Independent Expert Group on finance that it created, of which I am a member (Muscatelli 2008). I draw on these reports in what follows.

N O RT H E R N I R E L A N D : A DI G E S T E D H I S TO RY, DIGESTED In the earlier chapters we saw how Northern Ireland came into existence. Protestant Unionists in the north-east of Ireland raised a private army to oppose Home Rule. And in 1920 they ended up with Home Rule. But it was Home Rule on Unionist terms, for Unionists. The 1920 Act envisaged the

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governments of northern and southern Ireland coming together as a federation under a devolved government of Ireland. Any possibility of this was dispelled by election results in the south, and by the Treaty of 1921, in which the United Kingdom recognized the independence of the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland). Some actors from previous chapters took up their positions in Northern Ireland Protestant civil society. Fred Crawford the gunrunner received his Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) personally at the hands of George V at the opening of the grand parliament building at Stormont, east Belfast, in 1921 (McNeill 1922: Chapter XXIV). This seems an odd reward for Crawford’s numerous breaches of the British and Danish law.6 James Craig became the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, serving until his death in 1940. He abolished proportional representation for Stormont elections in 1929 in defiance of the UK government. The latter complained that PR, and the associated protection of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, was a fundamental part of the devolution settlement. Furthermore, it was not within the powers delegated to the Stormont parliament to change the electoral system. Against this Craig had, and used, a credible threat. If the UK government blocked the abolition of PR, he told them, he would simply call a Northern Ireland general election, at which he would be returned with an even larger electoral majority and re-present the proposal. Faced with this, the UK government backed down. In 1934, when Eamon de Valera had recently become prime minister of the Irish Free State and had promised to base a revised constitution on Catholic social teaching, Craig said in Stormont, ‘All I boast of is that we are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state.’ The permanent minority status of Catholics was unstable. The state, and almost all local authorities, was permanently in Unionist hands, assisted by gerrymandering of local government boundaries and the abolition of PR for Stormont. At various times, Irish nationalist paramilitaries, under the changeable banner of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), threatened the state. As J. R. Fisher had predicted (Chapter 7), they were at their strongest in solidly Catholic south Armagh, close to the boundary with the south. However, they did not pose a credible military threat until 1968. The so-called Troubles that then broke out claimed about 3,500 lives in the following thirty years. To give this number some perspective, note that about 5,000 men of the thirth-sixth Ulster Division— the former Protestant paramilitaries of 1912–14—died in the first ten days of the Somme in 1916. The Stormont government responded to the Troubles by interning suspected Catholic paramilitaries without trial. They largely got the wrong people, whom they successfully converted into paramilitaries. On refusing to

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cede control of internment to the UK government in 1972, the old Stormont was prorogued, never to reconvene. The UK government then began a thirty-five-year struggle to bring peace and restore devolved government to Northern Ireland. These objectives were hard to reconcile. Since ProtestantUnionists still formed the majority of the population, their parties would dominate any restored local democracy. Several times the UK government tried and failed to impose political cohabitation on Northern Ireland. They designed constitutions that required governments to be cross-community coalitions. They finally, at the time of writing, seem to have succeeded in 2007, when a coalition government led by the two extreme parties—the Protestant-Unionist Democratic Unionists and the Catholic-nationalist Sinn Fein—warily got to work. However, there have been numerous suspensions of devolved government in Northern Ireland, and there may be more. In the days of the British Empire, British constitutional writers talked of bringing ‘responsible government’ to their colonies. They never brought it to the nearest one. The financial arrangements for Stormont were based on those that Gladstone had dreamt up in 1886 for a devolved Ireland. Most domestic responsibilities would be devolved to the Home Rule Parliament. So would responsibility to collect taxes in Ireland. There are two main ways to devolve tax-raising power: ‘assignment’ and devolution proper. Under assignment, the proceeds of certain taxes (such as income tax or land taxes) are handed over to the subnational government, and it must pay for the services it provides out of them. If the subnational government’s area is richer than average, it may be required to make an ‘Imperial Contribution’ as Gladstone and his successors called it. An Imperial contribution would pay for the services that were provided to Ireland by the UK (‘Imperial’) Parliament, such as defence, foreign policy, and the collection of customs. If it were poorer than average, it would have to receive equalization payments if it was to provide the same level of services as the rest of the country. Under tax devolution, the subnational government has all the above powers, but also the power to vary tax rates or tax bases. A tax rate is self-explanatory. A tax base is just anything that may be the subject of taxation. For instance, the United Kingdom has a relatively narrow tax base for the main expenditure tax (VAT) because food, house-building, and children’s clothes are excluded from the tax base. A subnational government with devolved tax powers might, for instance, have the power to broaden or narrow the VAT tax base. The concepts in these two paragraphs are explained more fully in Muscatelli (2008). Northern Ireland was created with the forms of tax devolution but the reality of utter dependency. Tax rates and tax bases marched in step with those in Great Britain, yielding revenue that was miserably insufficient even to fund domestic services, let alone to pay an Imperial Contribution. In his

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authoritative treatment, James Mitchell (2006) echoes Bagehot by calling the financial relationship between Westminster and Stormont ‘undignified and inefficient’. As Mitchell summarizes: what transpired was the opposite of that which had been intended by the 1920 [Government of Ireland] Act. Instead of Stormont having sources for raising revenue from which it funded services (a revenue-based system), Stormont’s expenditure determined levels of income as agreed with the Treasury (an expenditure-based system) . . . a system which encouraged dependency on the centre and discouraged financial responsibility (Mitchell 2006: 58).

For this there were two reasons. One was structural unemployment. Like Scotland and Wales, Northern Ireland was badly hit by the Great Depression. The skills which had built the Titanic in 1912 were less in demand. Therefore the UK welfare state came to function as a social insurance mechanism. Secondly, and even more important in my view, Northern Ireland posed a credible threat to the Union. Its large Catholic minority, frozen out of power and public resources, had no reason to support the state. Perhaps the offer of the UK level rather than (the then much lower) Irish level of social protection deferred the revolt until 1968, but in retrospect it is hard to see how a permanent minority can have been expected to remain quiescent forever. After the Troubles broke out, the United Kingdom moved sharply away from the primordial Unionism of 1912–14, leaving the local majority of Northern Ireland Unionists potentially isolated. They had credible threats of their own. For instance, they defeated the first power-sharing executive created in 1973 by means of a strike that shut down power and transport in 1974 (for documentation see http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/uwc/index.html). Optimists then predicted that with the accession of both the United Kingdom and Ireland to the European Union (EU) in 1973, the old issues would fade away. In the long run, the optimists may yet prove to be right. Effective AngloIrish cooperation began in 1985, but nothing substantial happened for a further decade. It took very hard diplomacy through the last years of UK Conservative government and the first year of Tony Blair’s premiership, matched by equal commitment from the Irish government and from centrist politicians in Northern Ireland, to produce the Belfast (‘Good Friday’) Agreement of 1998. This set up a new assembly and the government of Northern Ireland, with compulsory cohabitation. The party that gains the largest number of seats in the Assembly supplies the First Minister; the next largest supplies the Deputy First Minister. Given the demography of Northern Ireland, this implies a Protestant, Unionist, First Minister and a Catholic,

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nationalist, Deputy First Minister. At the same time, the government of Ireland promised to hold a referendum on removing the irredentist clauses from its constitution that had laid a claim over the territory of Northern Ireland. The required referenda passed overwhelmingly in the Republic of Ireland and comfortably among both communities in Northern Ireland (although more narrowly among Protestants than among Catholics). Although there have been several suspensions of devolution since then, an uneasy sort-of-calm has settled over cohabitation at the time of writing.

A N D TO A LE S S E R E XT E N T WA L E S Of the three non-English parts of the United Kingdom, Wales has always posed the least credible threat to the Union. Unlike Ireland and Scotland, it never elected a separatist MP until 1966. The nationalist party Plaid Cymru (‘Party of Wales’) is a party more of cultural than of economic protest. It is strong-to-hegemonic in Welsh-speaking Wales, and its voters are much more likely to be Welsh-speaking than Welsh voters as a whole (McLean and McMillan 2005, Tables 8.14 to 8.18). But its strength there is its weakness in the rest of Wales. Fewer than 30 per cent of Welsh inhabitants speak Welsh (Table 8.1). As a language party it has been quite successful. Policies inspired by threat or reality of Plaid voting in Welsh-speaking Wales have reversed a long decline in the proportion of the population who speak the language. But Plaid Cymru is weak in Anglophone Wales. It is not credible to believe that it could win the majority of seats in Wales, either in the National Assembly or at Westminster. Table 8.1 Knowledge of Welsh.

Wales/Cymru North Wales Mid and West Wales South Wales West South Wales Central South Wales East

All people aged 3 and over

People aged 3 and over: Some knowledge of Welsh (%)

People aged 3 and over: No knowledge of Welsh (%)

2,805,701 602,898 511,300

28.43 39.46 48.38

71.57 60.54 51.61

487,064 616,999

23.45 18.06

76.56 81.94

587,440

14.78

85.22

Source: 2001 Census, Crown copyright 2003

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Accordingly, devolution to Wales is more limited. Visit any machine-readable text on UK devolution, type ‘and to a lesser extent Wales’ into an internet search engine, and there is a good chance that you will score at least one hit. From Tudor until Victorian times, Wales was administratively inseparable from England. When recognizably modern boundaries, of administrative counties and parliamentary constituencies, were created in the late ninenteenth century, it was even uncertain whether the county of Monmouth was part of Wales. The administrative phrase ‘Wales and Monmouthshire’ which was in regular use from then until the 1960s, suggests that it was not, which might surprise the people of Blaenau Gwent. A promise to create a Welsh Office appeared in the Labour Party’s 1964 manifesto, where it attracted little attention even in Wales. Nevertheless, a Welsh Office headed by a Secretary of State for Wales came into existence when Labour won the general election. The Aberfan disaster of October 1966 showed graphically how weak was the most junior Secretary of State (McLean and Johnes 2000). At Aberfan, 144 people, mostly children in school, were killed when a colliery waste tip slid down a mountainside and into the school and the village. But South Wales was impregnably Labour; therefore a Labour government could ignore its interests, and the Conservative opposition could not hope to win a seat there. It posed no credible threat to either party. Therefore, the interests of the coal industry trumped those of Wales. After the disaster, Ministers protected the National Coal Board from the consequences of its criminal negligence. To add insult to injury, the Charity Commission intervened in the affairs of the disaster fund when it should not have done (obstructing the construction of a memorial and flat-rate payments to bereaved families) and failed to intervene when it should have done. The Labour government improperly took £150,000 from the charitable disaster fund towards the costs of removing the remaining tips from the mountainside. Removing dangerous tips was the responsibility of the organization that had put them there. Not until Wales had got devolution was this wrong righted. The £150,000 was repaid to the disaster fund at par by Ron Davies, the first post-devolution Secretary of State. The chapter was not closed until 2007, when the National Assembly for Wales repaid the £1.5 million that represented the true value, in current pounds, of the money taken in 1968 plus accrued interest forgone (McLean 2009). Plaid Cymru won its first Westminster seat a few months before Aberfan, in the Welsh-speaking constituency of Carmarthen. Although it got a respectable vote in by-elections in the south Wales Valleys and won some council seats, it failed to break out. Therefore, the second Wilson administration’s offer of devolution to Wales in 1974 was, as usual, an afterthought. Scotland engaged Harold Wilson’s statecraft; Wales did not. To the many enemies of

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the devolution flagship, the Welsh mast was the easiest target. It was blown off in the February 1977 defeat mentioned earlier. Scotland and Wales were then split into two vessels. As with Scotland, the Government of Wales Act 1978 was enacted subject to a referendum. In that referendum, the Welsh electorate rejected devolution by a margin of eighty to twenty. The ‘No’ campaign managed to persuade the electorate that devolution would create a privileged class of Welsh speakers. Not coincidentally, the proportion of the population who spoke Welsh bottomed at 19 per cent in the 1981 Census.7 The second revival of devolution was again driven from Scotland, as described above. Once again, separate referenda took place, this time before legislation. In Wales, the outcome in 1997 was agonizingly close for the devolutionists, with No ahead all night until the last area reported, which was one of the rural Welsh-speaking areas tipping the overall result to a squeak of a Yes (McLean 2001b, Table 1). Although the Welsh-speaking/ Anglophone division persisted, it was much weaker, and support for devolution was much higher in both parts of Wales than in 1979. Although the majority for devolution could not have been narrower, it set a path for the government of Wales that is unlikely to be retraced. Once a National Assembly came into existence, all the interests and lobbies moved from London to Cardiff. Because in all three devolved territories, the national assembly was elected by proportional representation, the most Unionist party—the Conservatives—won seats in Scotland and Wales that they would not have won otherwise. Everybody expected the National Assembly to be dominated by Labour, even with proportional representation. In fact it has not been. Labour governed, either as a minority administration or in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, in the first two sessions of the National Assembly (1999–2003 and 2003–7). In the third Assembly, elected in 2007, Labour failed to gain a majority, and after some haggling, went into a coalition with Plaid Cymru. Plaid thus entered government for the first time. Nationalists therefore share power in all three devolved administrations elected in 2007.

THE WICKED ISSUES: FINANCE AND REPRESENTATION Finance and representation were the two issues that most troubled Mr Gladstone in 1886. They cause Mr Brown and Mr Cameron no less trouble in 2009. All three devolved administrations are financed on an expenditure, not revenue, basis. Scotland has a trivial power to vary the standard rate of income tax up or down by 3p in the pound. This is called the Scottish Variable

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Rate of tax (SVR). It was authorized by referendum in 1998. But it has never been used. Apart from SVR, the only tax base that the devolved administrations control is real estate. They levy business rates and council tax (domestic rates in Northern Ireland). Real estate—land and property—is a very suitable subject for tax devolution. According to the theory of fiscal federalism (Oates 1972; Muscatelli 2008), the less mobile a tax base, the more suitable it is to devolve to subnational government. People, and companies, can easily move or hide. Land cannot move, nor, in the short run, can the buildings on it. A naı¨ve public finance specialist might therefore expect that the governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland would be vigorously growing their real-estate tax base; ensuring vigorous economic growth and encouraging house-building and commercial developments in high-value locations; and taxing land and property to pay for domestic services. They have done the opposite. Northern Ireland has resisted Treasury pressure to increase domestic rates for decades. The minority Scottish government announced in 2008 that it would abolish Council Tax. (It had to abandon this promise in 2009). In Wales, there has been a revaluation of houses for Council Tax, but this left so many scars that Welsh politicians do not want to go anywhere near the issue. Whenever there is a change in relative tax liability, those who suffer scream; those who benefit keep silent. Council Tax has now become seriously regressive throughout the United Kingdom, so that it is a much more substantial burden on the poor than on the rich. This could be addressed by increasing the bands, or turning it into a true land value tax, levied at a constant rate on the capital value of each property. Why do the devolved administrations (DAs in Treasury-speak) make such a weak tax effort? Because they can. Essentially, all of their funds come by block grant from Westminster under the notorious ‘Barnett Formula’. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, the block grant has been so generous that their administrations have never had to make much tax effort. In Wales, this is not so, but after the bruising experience of Council Tax revaluation there is as yet no sign that the National Assembly wants to revisit land and property taxation. In the 1970s (actually before Joel Barnett became a minister),8 the Treasury devised a new formula for block grant to replace the ‘Goschen proportion’ that had existed since 1888. Under Goschen, some tax revenues were assigned to Ireland, Scotland, and England (which then included Wales) in the proportions 9:11:80. Times changed; most of Ireland left the Union in 1921; and Scotland’s population steadily declined to less than 11/80ths of that of England and Wales. But in annual bargaining, Scottish officials could always

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insist on at least 11/91 of the Great Britain share of spending on any programme. If circumstances such as remoteness or poor health could be argued, they were on top of that. Therefore public spending per head in Scotland on every domestic service was above that in England and Wales. There was no political devolution to Scotland from 1888 to 1997, but there was administrative devolution. Scotland always had a Secretary (titled Secretary of State from 1926: Mitchell 2003: 182–8). The Secretary of State for Scotland could always argue in Cabinet for Scotland to have at least the Goschen proportion of any spending programme and, where possible, more. Like Northern Ireland, Scotland possessed a credible threat against the Union. With devolution in the air in the 1970s, Treasury officials renewed a ninetyyear old struggle to cut Scotland down to size. They devised two weapons: the Barnett Formula and a needs assessment. Barnett was intended to serve two purposes. The first was to substitute a single block for the previous service-by-service appropriations for Scotland. This reduced transaction costs and scope for bargaining. The low transaction costs are nowadays put forward as one argument (the only credible argument) for retaining the Barnett regime (HM Government Scotland Office 2008). The second was to design a formula with the property that in the long run spending per head would become equal in all the territories it covered. This is because Barnett assigns increments in expenditure each year in proportion to population, leaving the 1970s baseline untouched. In the long run, the increments should swamp the baseline, leading to equal expenditure per head. By 1980, Barnett was applied to all three (what are now) DAs, with England as a reference category. Therefore, by 2008, if Barnett were the whole story, expenditure per head should be imperceptibly different from equal. It is not. Scotland gets more per head than Wales, even though Wales is poorer. This confirms that credible threats do more work than equalizing formulas to determine the allocations. Moreover, equal spending per head is the wrong target even in principle. Wales and Northern Ireland are poor; Scotland has a cold climate, a long indented coastline, and numerous inhabited offshore islands. A needs-based allocation would give each of the three more spending per head than England. But how much more? This was the aim of the other branch of Treasury policy: to determine the relative spending needs of the four countries of the Unites States. The exercise was famously bad-tempered, and documents issued to me in 2005 in a Freedom of Information request proved that the Treasury and the Scottish Office remained un-reconciled on the question of how much greater were Scotland’s health needs per head than England’s. The Treasury published meagre results in 1979 (Table 8.2).

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Table 8.2 The Needs Assessment 1979 (data relate to 1976–7).

Needs per head for devolved services Expenditure per head on devolved services

England

Scotland

Wales

Northern Ireland

100 100

116 122

109 106

131 135

Source: HM Treasury (1979)

Thus Scotland and Ireland were more generously funded than they ‘needed’ to be for the services that were then proposed for devolution; Wales more meanly. Applying the convergent Barnett Formula would therefore have had perverse effects for Wales. It seems that the Treasury intended to let Barnett operate, for Scotland and Northern Ireland, until their spending had come down to their respective ‘needs’, whereupon a needs formula would be substituted. This has never happened. The Needs Assessment did not appear until after the Conservatives had won the 1979 general election. As noted above, Margaret Thatcher immediately scrapped any talk of, or plans for, devolution. The Treasury made a unilateral needs assessment in 1984, which was bitterly resisted by the Scottish Office, as has been revealed in a 2008 Freedom of Information request.9 The Scottish Constitutional Convention had every incentive to let that sleeping dog lie, and did. Therefore, Barnett survived to become embedded in the devolution White Papers (although not the succeeding Acts) in 1997. Defenders of the status quo may fairly say that Barnett was the deal on which the Scots and Welsh were invited to vote; they voted for devolution on the assumption that Barnett would continue; and that therefore it should. But that line has become more and more difficult to sustain. By the end of 2008 three official inquiries into Barnett had started. One was the Scottish Calman Commission. One was a House of Lords Select Committee, initiated on a motion from Lord Barnett himself. The third is the Independent Commission on Funding and Finance for Wales, announced in 2008 as an outcome of the 2007 coalition agreement between Labour and Plaid Cymru.10 This book is not the right place for a technical discussion of the post-Barnett options (for which see McLean 2005; McLean, Lodge, and Schmuecker 2008; Muscatelli 2008), but I hope this section has shown that the United Kingdom is not in constitutional equilibrium on devolution finance.

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Nor is it on representation. When Mr Gladstone sat down to think about Westminster representation for Ireland after Home Rule, he came to various conclusions which are as valid now as then. The first was that Ireland could not be excluded altogether, as he had originally proposed: for that would mean taxation without representation for Ireland. The second was that the ‘in and out solution’ that he toyed with in 1893 would not work either. The ‘in and out solution’ has recently been revived under the guise of ‘English votes on English laws’. Under either name it would solve the West Lothian Question (WLQ) as follows. MPs for a territory with devolved government would be excluded from speaking or voting on bills that did not affect their constituency. In the most refined version of the proposal, put forward by the Conservative Party’s Democracy Task Force in summer 2008, such MPs would be barred from speaking or voting on the committee stage of such business, while remaining free to vote on the principles (Second and Third Reading). Their thought is that such MPs would exercise voluntary restraint in the case where an English-only Committee on the bill has modified it before it comes up for Third Reading, and would not simply reinstate an earlier version. How frequent is the WLQ in practice? Here it is necessary to be precise. A government with a UK Commons majority often does not have a majority in one or other part of the country. Wales has never returned a Conservative majority of MPs since 1868, but has been governed by the Conservatives (alone or in coalition) for most of the time since then. Since the 1950s, the same has been true of Scotland. It was true of Ireland throughout the nineteenth century, and of Northern Ireland since the divorce between the Conservatives and the Ulster Unionists in 1972. This does not mean that the WLQ occurs constantly. What I have defined elsewhere as the ‘true’ WLQ occurs only when MPs from Not-X determine policy affecting only X, when the majority of MPs from X voted in a different way. The principal instances of the true WLQ are then:  (where X ¼ Ireland): Irish Coercion Acts in the nineteenth century  (where X ¼ Wales): the Welsh Church Act—blocked until 1920; Liverpool Corporation Act 1957 (flooding a Welsh valley and destroying a village for Liverpool’s water supply: Butt Philip 1975: 297)  (where X ¼ Scotland): Abolition of Domestic Rates (etc.) Scotland Act 1987 (i.e. poll tax. Butler, Adonis and Travers 1994: 102)  (where X ¼ NI): Prorogation of Stormont 1972

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 (where X ¼ England): Prayer Book Measure 1927, 1928 Four votes in 2004, two on top-up fees and two on foundation hospitals Since devolution, the first four cases have become impossible in practice. Whatever the statutes say (to be considered in a moment), the UK Parliament could not legislate on a matter affecting only Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. So the WLQ has, since devolution, become exclusively an English question. How worried should the English be about the WLQ? A current jibe is ‘The solution to the WLQ is a large Conservative majority.’ A government (of any party) with a large majority should have not difficulty in enacting legislation applying to all parts of its territory. (The constraints on the Liberals in 1906 and Labour in 1945 came from the unelected house). The narrower the majority of the elected government, the more conspicuous the WLQ becomes. It becomes truly toxic in the event that one party has a majority in England, and the opposite party has a majority in the United Kingdom. The pattern of centre-periphery politics since the 1860s determines that, in the United Kingdom, that should read ‘when the Conservatives have a majority in England, and Labour, alone or in coalition, has a majority in the UK’. If we treat Labour as the successor to the Gladstonian Liberals, then that situation has arisen in the Parliaments elected in 1885, 1892, 1910J, 1910D, 1923, 1929, 1950, 1964, 1974F, and 1974O. If we then treat the general election of 1868 as the first with a wide enough franchise to make the exercise meaningful, we may ask how probable is the troublesome WLQ for England. The first step is to calculate the ten parliaments listed as a proportion of all parliaments since 1868. The answer is 0.29. But the prevalence of the English WLQ is lower than its incidence. Twenty-nine per cent of general elections have given rise to it, but it is a problem for less than 29 per cent of the time, because these have typically been short parliaments. Rounding the duration of parliaments to the nearest whole year, the English WLQ has prevailed for twenty-five years since 1868, a prevalence of 0.18. The shortness of the parliaments is endogenous. A government that does not command a majority in the country that accounts for 85 per cent of the UK population is likely to be a weak and short-lived government. Note also that four of the ten cases are before the secession of most of Ireland. Furthermore, Ireland was, as noted in earlier chapters, seriously over-represented before 1918. This gave the Unionists their sense of primordial grievance during the parliament of December 1910, by far the longestlasting in the series.

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These descriptive statistics help us to revisit ‘English votes on English laws’. Mr Gladstone dropped the idea for two reasons, each sufficient to kill it. The first was that it was impossible to determine which laws were English and which were not. The second was that it was impossible for two governments to coexist in a single legislature. The first issue is at the heart of the Democracy Taskforce solution. For this scheme to work, the Speaker would have to issue a territorial extent certificate not merely for each bill, but for each clause of a bill. Formally, the territorial extent of Bills and Acts is already stated, as ‘Scotland’, ‘England & Wales’, ‘Wales’, ‘Great Britain’, etc. But the reality is too complicated for the current formulas, which would become unworkable in a parliament such as that of 1892 or 1950. For the party battle would then be displaced from the substance of a bill to its territorial extent. The most controversial Act of the Parliament of 1950 was perhaps the nationalization of iron and steel. If ‘English votes on English laws’ had been in force, the Conservatives would have insisted that nationalization of assets in England was an English matter, for English MPs only to vote on. Either they would have failed, to the detriment of the authority of the Speaker; or they would have succeeded, in which case there would have been two governments in that Parliament. The UK (Labour) government would have controlled votes on defence, foreign policy, and perhaps taxation and social protection. But it would have lost every controversial vote on an ‘English law’, and hence could not have controlled health, education, housing, or transport policy in 85 per cent of the country. The Barnett Formula could give rise to similar issues. Scots, Welsh, and Irish MPs can currently insist that there is no such thing as a ‘purely English’ piece of legislation: or, at least, that if there is such a thing, neither English university top-up fees nor foundation hospitals are cases in point. For any increase or cut in English public expenditure carries, under Barnett, a corresponding increase or cut in Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Ireland public expenditure, pro rata to their populations. Therefore the constituents of a Scottish MP have a legitimate interest in the funding of the English NHS. If ‘English votes on English laws’ are impracticable, have we reached an impasse? Public opinion both in Scotland and in England favours Scots MPs being barred from voting on English matters (data monitored by John Curtice, reported in Hazell 2008b: 78). It seems fair, but impracticable. However, a rough substitute is available, and it has been tried before. That is to reduce the numbers, but not the powers, of MPs from territories with devolved governments. This would involve two steps: reducing them to their population share, and then reducing them below it. Scotland and Wales have been overrepresented in the UK Parliament since 1922. Ireland was overrepresented from the Famine of 1846–8 (which sharply

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reduced Ireland’s absolute population, and therefore reduced her population share by even more) until the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921. We have discussed the reasons for, and extent of, this overrepresentation elsewhere (McLean 1995; McLean and McMillan 2005). Once again, it is a story of credible threats. Although all three territories lost population share due to economic decline, politicians who wanted to sustain the Union did not want to give separatists an extra grievance by cutting the territories’ representation at Westminster. However, in the case of Northern Ireland, the UK government of the day took the opposite line. Because in 1920 Northern Ireland got the Home Rule its leaders had been resisting, as a quid pro quo its representation at Westminster was reduced to about 2/3 of its population share—from about eighteen territorial seats to twelve. This policy was probably designed in order to cut the numbers of Westminster MPs from southern Ireland, who had posed such a threat to the Union since 1880. But with Irish independence, those seats never came into existence. I have found no record of resentment in Northern Ireland at its under-representation at Westminster, which lasted until the October 1974 parliament inclusive. The majority community had its Protestant Parliament. The minority community was impotent anyhow. Any visibility it got at Westminster would be imperceptibly different with four MPs or with two. The situation at the general election of 2005 is shown in Table 8.3. By 2005, Wales was considerably over-represented. Scotland, although it had lost some seats following devolution, was slightly over-represented. So was Northern Ireland, in proportion to its relative electorate, although not in proportion to population. (This disparity probably arises because Northern Ireland has an unusually young population structure). Thus the first move in this solution to the WLQ would be to introduce parity of representation for the four nations of the United Kingdom. Holding the size of the Commons constant, this gives the numbers in the second-last column of Table 8.3. At parity, Scotland would have 56 seats; Wales 33; and Northern Ireland 15. The second move would be to repeat the calculations made in 1920 for Ireland. Giving each territory with devolution 2/3 its proportionate assignment of Commons seats produces the final column of Table 8.3. Scotland then gets 38 seats; Wales 22; and Northern Ireland 10. Scotland and Wales, at least, might be allowed an extra seat or at most two to allow for their difficult geographies and dispersed rural electorates. But even in Scotland and Wales, most of the electorate is urban. This solution not only sidesteps Mr Gladstone’s insoluble dilemma, but has independent merits. It shows that devolution comes at a price, but a price which public opinion seems to regard as fair. If devolution to the English regions, stalled since it was rejected in a referendum in the North-east in 2004,

Table 8.3 Population, electorate, and seats in the House of Commons, nations of the United Kingdom, 2005

Territory England Scotland Wales Northern Ireland United Kingdom

Population (thousands)

Population ratio

Electorate (thousands)

Electorate ratio

Seats

Compared to population

Compared to electorate

Seats at electoral parity

Seats with DAs at 2/3

50,431.7 5,094.8 2,958.6 1,724.4

83.8 8.5 4.9 2.9

37,043.6 3,857.9 2,233.5 1,045.5

83.8 8.7 5.1 2.4

528 59 40 18

0.98 1.08 1.26 0.97

0.98 1.05 1.23 1.18

541 56 33 15

541 38 22 10

60,209.5

100.0

44,180.5

100.0

645

—

—

645

611

Note: Population: mid-year estimates, electoral: 2004 electorate (in force at GE 2005). Source : Office for National Statistics; author’s calculations.

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returns to the policy agenda, the same deal could be offered. If accepted, the size of the House of Commons, which is unusually large by international standards, could be reduced. Most subtly, the probability of being pivotal is not a linear function of bloc size. Suppose, to simplify, that all MPs from each non-English territory voted as a territorial bloc, as the eighty-five-strong Irish Party did from 1885 until 1918. A bloc of (say) 40, one might expect, would be half as likely to be pivotal as one of 80. However, in general this is not so (Felsenthal and Machover 1998). Although much would depend on the particular configurations of all the parties involved, a bloc of 40 would probably be pivotal less than half as often as a bloc of 80. Illustratively, there has probably been no occasion since 1920 when the ten or a dozen Northern Irish Unionist MPs have held the balance of power in the Commons on their own. There have been pivotal votes, to be sure. But in a hung parliament such as those of 1974–9, everybody may be pivotal. Prime Minister Callaghan’s desperate search for votes to avoid losing a motion of no confidence in March 1979 caused a cascade of presents. The three Welsh Nationalists got silicosis compensation. The Ulster Unionists ‘openly offered their votes for the speedy installation of a gas pipeline’ to Northern Ireland (Butler and Kavanagh 1980: 126). In most matters, however, the interests of Protestant/Unionist and of Catholic/Nationalist legislators are opposed. Thus, given that there is no prospect of the return of an eighty-fivestrong territorial bloc to the Commons, in most situations either no territorial bloc is pivotal or every territorial bloc is pivotal. This perhaps takes the sting out of the WLQ.

S OV E R E I G N T Y I N A DEVO LV E D U N I T E D K I N G DO M The form of the devolution statutes is defiantly Diceyan. The Government of Ireland Act 1920 states at s.75: Notwithstanding the establishment of the Parliaments of Southern and Northern Ireland, or the Parliament of Ireland, or anything contained in this Act, the supreme authority of the Parliament of the United Kingdom shall remain unaffected and undiminished over all persons, matters, and things in Ireland and every part thereof.

The Scotland Act 1998 states at s.28 (7): (7) This section does not affect the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to make laws for Scotland.

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The Act makes provision for reference to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to determine disputes as to whether the Scottish Parliament has passed an Act that is ultra vires: that is, outwith its powers. In the usual ‘lesser extent’ mode, the Government of Wales Act 1998 sets the National Assembly up as a sort of biggish local authority, where the preservation of Parliamentary supremacy is so fundamental that the act does not have to mention it at all. That model having proved unworkable, the Government of Wales Act 2006 aligns the National Assembly more closely with the Scottish Parliament, and contains at s.93 (5) the same saving as for Scotland and (Northern) Ireland: (5) This Part does not affect the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to make laws for Wales.

However, form and reality diverge. A veto player—credible threat perspective is more insightful than a Diceyan one. As already noted, when James Craig promised to abolish proportional representation for elections to Stormont (which is prescribed in the 1920 Act at s.14), the British government was unable to stop him. At his back, he had the credible threat of calling a Northern Ireland general election, being re-elected with as large a majority as he already had, or larger, and simply re-presenting the proposal as often as he had to until the British government backed down. Similar issues are currently arising in Scotland, although without the sectarian tinge of Northern Ireland in the 1920s. The SNP minority government has announced: The Scottish Government is committed to bringing forward a referendum bill in 2010, offering the options of enhanced devolution and independence—but it will be the people of Scotland who decide Scotland’s constitutional future.11

But these are explicitly reserved matters under the Scotland Act 1998. The Scottish Parliament has no power to decide them. Now listen to the dog that has not barked. The UK Government has not said that the Scottish Government’s proposal is unconstitutional or ultra vires. It undoubtedly is. But it does not serve the UK Government’s interest to make the point. For this would merely enhance the minority Scottish government’s standing in Scotland, just as Craig’s actions in 1929 did in Northern Ireland. In practice, if the Scottish people wish to secede from the United Kingdom, no UK government is likely to stop them, although it may require more than one referendum. In the case of Northern Ireland, explicit guarantees have been given, for example in the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973, and more comprehensively in the Belfast Agreement and Northern Ireland Act of 1998, that if the majority of voters in Northern Ireland vote to join the Irish Republic, the United

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Kingdom will not impede them. The 1973 Act did not repeal the 1920 Act in full; however, the 1998 Act has. Therefore s.75 has gone beyond recall. But it was used just once. In March 1972 the UK government demanded that the Northern Ireland government should hand over its powers of internment, which it exercised by virtue of a Stormont Act (the Civil Authorities [Special Powers] Act [Northern Ireland] 1922). The Northern Ireland Government refused and resigned en bloc. The United Kingdom then instituted direct rule under the Northern Ireland (Temporary Provisions) Act 1972, which passed all its stages within a week of the UK government’s proroguing of Stormont. Why was Northern Ireland Prime Minister Brian Faulkner not credible as Craig and Carson had been? Because the forces that had maintained Protestant ascendancy no longer could do so. Faulkner’s government depended on the British Army, which had entered Northern Ireland in 1969 to maintain public order. There was no new Curragh mutiny in 1969; nobody questioned the right of the UK government to send troops in support of the civil power, nor the duty of the troops to go. In retrospect it seems inevitable that the UK government, responsible for soldiers who were being killed, would take direct control. The Stormont government had lost its credible threat. The same point can be made in lawyers’ rather than political scientists’ language. In his authoritative account, Christopher McCrudden contrasts what he sees as British constitutional ‘pragmatism’ with the more ‘ideologically driven constitutional approach’ of the UK (and Irish) governments in relation to Northern Ireland. In the former tradition, ‘authoritative constitutional structures are thought to evolve; they are seldom made’ (2007: 228–9). By contrast, the constitution of (Northern) Ireland has been formally determined in successive statutes of 1914, 1920, 1972, 1973, and 1998. All of these constitutions since 1920 have incorporated some rights protection. The local majority have been given various assurances that the United Kingdom will not unconditionally walk away from Northern Ireland. But the local minority have also been given constitutional assurances. Some of these have turned out to be paper tigers, such as the guarantee of proportional representation in the 1920 Act. But the same Act contains a remarkable section (not discussed by McCrudden, although it would have helped his argument; but see also Calvert 1968; Hadfield 1989). 5.—(1) In the exercise of their power to make laws under this Act neither the Parliament of Southern Ireland nor the Parliament of Northern Ireland shall make a law so as either directly or indirectly to establish or endow any religion, or prohibit or restrict the free exercise thereof, or give a preference, privilege, or advantage, or impose any disability or disadvantage, on

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? account of religious belief or religious or ecclesiastical status, or make any religious belief or religious ceremony a condition of the validity of any marriage, or affect prejudicially the right of any child to attend a school receiving public money without attending the religious instruction at that school, or alter the constitution of any religious body except where the alteration is approved on behalf of the religious body by the governing body thereof, or divert from any religious denomination the fabric of cathedral churches, or, except for the purpose of roads, railways, lighting, water, or drainage works, or other works of public utility upon payment of compensation, any other property, or take any property without compensation.

The opening words of this section are clearly drawn from the First Amendment to the US Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The section shows that from the beginning the UK Parliament has been prepared to entrench rights protection in the devolved constitutions it has enacted. The trend has continued. The Northern Ireland constitution now contains elaborate provisions for forced consociation: controversial proposals require crosscommunity support. None of the devolved assemblies may act in a way that contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights (Lester and Beattie 2007: 82). Could the UK Parliament bind itself in the ways that it has bound the parliaments of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales? That is the subject at the heart of this book, to which I return in the final section. Next, however, I consider the erosions of parliamentary sovereignty due to two distinct European bodies: the EU and the Council of Europe.

9 The European Union and Other Supranational Entanglements DISENTANGLING EUROCONFUSION This chapter and the next explain how two supranational bodies, each with an attendant court, have eroded parliamentary sovereignty—perhaps sovereignty of any kind—in the United Kingdom. This chapter deals with the European Union (EU) and its court—the European Court of Justice. Chapter 10 deals with the Council of Europe and its court—the European Court of Human Rights. The two sets of bodies are frequently confused by many people, ranging from undergraduates to Eurosceptic newspapers and columnists. So we start with basic facts, similarities, and differences. The EU (then known as the European Communities) originally comprised six member states not including the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom joined in 1973. It now comprises twenty-seven member states including the United Kingdom. It has developed a body of Community law which is overseen by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) sitting in Luxembourg. It originated in the early 1950s as a set of three intergovernmental bodies—the European Coal and Steel Community (1950); EURATOM (European Atomic Energy Commission, 1955); and the European Economic Community (EEC, 1958). The three bodies merged, and formed what is now the EU. For simplicity, in this chapter I use the label EU anachronistically to denote whatever the body was called at the relevant time (successively, in English, the European Economic Community; European Community; European Union). The EU’s governing bodies are its Commission (an executive); its Council of Ministers (an intergovernmental body), and its Parliament (EP), first elected in 1979 as successor to an earlier unelected European Assembly. The Council of Europe is older. It was created in 1949 by ten founding member states including the United Kingdom. It now has forty-seven member states across the whole of Europe, including most of the European countries that are not EU member states. The Council of Europe created

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the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950 and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in 1959. The ECtHR sits in Strasbourg. Some of the confusion is understandable. Both bodies’ web sites1 resonate with generic Europeanness, their English-language versions being in a language which is not quite English. Both of them use yellow stars as a logo. To a first-time visitor they are probably as indistinguishable as the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. The EP, an organ of the EU, also sits sometimes in Strasbourg, the home of the ECtHR, which is not an EU body. The Second World War was swiftly followed by the ‘iron curtain’, east of which the Soviet Union dominated the nominally independent ‘people’s democracies’. The last of these to fall under complete Communist domination was Czechoslovakia, after the death (perhaps murder) of the last non-Communist minister there, Jan Masaryk, in March 1948. The states of Western Europe and North America therefore decided to create three organizations to protect (their conception of) democracy and human rights from any revival of Nazism or spread of Soviet Communism. One of those, NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), is not discussed in this book because it has remained an intergovernmental military organization with no powers give instructions to its member states. The other two have become in part supranational organizations. The distinction between an intergovernmental and a supranational organization is, at least in principle, clear-cut. An intergovernmental organization, as the name implies, is created by governments and can act only if, and insofar as, its member state governments allow it to. The word is first attested, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in 1927, in the era of the League of Nations. The League was undoubtedly an intergovernmental (and not a supranational) organization, a restriction that hastened its downfall. A supranational organization does have powers over governments. The first usage of ‘supranational’ picked up by the OED is in 1908, but two of the early defining quotations are of particular interest. In 1924, John Reith, first chairman of the BBC, described it as a word ‘coined, I believe, by Lord Cecil to indicate that which is above not only nationality, but something more even than international’. Lord Robert Cecil was president of the League of Nations Union, a pressure group which tried, but failed, to make the League of Nations supranational (Ceadel 2004). And in 1950, Winston Churchill, then Leader of the Opposition, gave his reasons for refusing to support UK membership of the ECSC as follows: I would add, to make my answer quite clear to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, that if he asked me, ‘Would you agree to a supranational

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authority which has the power to tell Great Britain not to cut any more coal or make any more steel, but to grow tomatoes instead?’ I should say, without hesitation, the answer is ‘No’. (HC Deb 27 June 1950 vol 476 cc2104–59 quoted at 2147)

The speakers in that debate, on the Schuman Plan which created a supranational High Authority for the ECSC, were more aware of intergovernmental and supranational power than either the White Paper or the debates on the UK’s successful application to join the EU in 1972.

A HI S TO RY O F U K AC C E S S I ON Thus, from the outset, the institutions that became the EU had both intergovernmental and supranational components—and some British politicians recognized this fact when considering whether to join. The idea behind the Schuman Plan was explicitly to create a supranational authority over coal and steel in the Ruhr so as to prevent any repetition of the FrancoGerman hostilities which had marked the slide into the Second World War (Gillingham 2003: 22–30). The ECSC came to nothing. Jean Monnet, the actual author of the Schuman Plan, had failed to realize that neither was any longer a commanding height of the European economy. Coal and steel no longer mattered enough to start a European war. But the principle of a supranational High Authority was embedded in all the EU institutions, with the aim of achieving economic, political, and more recently environmental goals that were (in the view of the Commission) beyond the capacity of national governments. There has been a long and fruitless academic debate on whether the EU should be regarded as primarily intergovernmental or primarily supranational (but see Moravcsik 1998; McLean 2003). It is inextricably both. The Council of Ministers, comprising ministers from every member state, is explicitly intergovernmental. The Commission (successor to Monnet’s ‘High Authority’) is explicitly supranational. The Court—the ECJ—aggressively took supranational authority to itself in a series of cases which UK politicians had not yet noticed in 1972, as will be discussed below. The Parliament is more supranational than the Council of Ministers, but less supranational than the Commission. As the Commission, Parliament, and Council of Ministers have mutual vetoes in certain circumstances, the win set of the status quo consists, at most, of points on the contract curve joining them (Tsebelis 2002: chapter 11). An example of an effective veto is known, in the curious

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language of eurocracy, as the ‘Luxembourg Compromise’. The Luxembourg Compromise is a compromise in the same sense that the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 is a peacekeeping mission. In 1965, the French government of General de Gaulle boycotted the Council of Ministers in protest against what he regarded as the overreaching supranationalism of the Commission, which had proposed that decisions on farm support should be taken by qualified majority votes. The French agreed to refill their empty chair in Luxembourg in 1966, on condition that: Where, in the case of decisions which may be taken by majority vote on a proposal of the Commission, very important interests of one or more partners are at stake, the Members of the Council will endeavour, within a reasonable time, to reach solutions which can be adopted by all the Members of the Council while respecting their mutual interests and those of the Community.2

This comes from the EU’s official definition of the phrase ‘Luxembourg Compromise’. We will see shortly how the Compromise has held up. Neither Clement Attlee’s Labour government (1945–51) nor their Conservative successors under Winston Churchill or Anthony Eden (1951–7) were interested in applying for membership of the Communities. The next Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, made the first application in 1961, but it was vetoed by de Gaulle. Labour’s leader, Hugh Gaitskell, opposed the Macmillan application. But both parties contained substantial pro- and anti-EU factions. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made a second application in 1967, to the annoyance of many of his followers. De Gaulle, still in office, vetoed it again. But he resigned in 1969. This cleared the way for the UK Conservative government elected under Edward Heath in 1970 to make a third attempt. All three applications crosscut UK party lines. Wilson had applied in the teeth of hostility from much of the Labour Party, especially but not only on the left. When Heath applied, the official line of the Labour Opposition was arrived at tortuously: to ‘oppose . . . entry into the Common Market on the terms negotiated by the Conservative government’ (resolution of Labour Party National Executive 28.07.1971, quoted in Butler and Kitzinger 1976: 16). The idea of a referendum on the terms was born at the same time. It appealed to anti-marketeers in both main parties, who suspected, rightly, that the median member of the public was more hostile to the EU than was the median MP. The Commons debates on the European Communities Bill were thus highly unusual in Westminster two-party terms. The Heath government had a fairly small overall majority, holding 330 of the 630 seats in the

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Commons after the General Election. This number, however, included eight Ulster Unionists who were to defect during the Parliament. Although their defection was for other reasons, they were anti-marketeers. The fate of the bill therefore rested in the hands of the two groups of rebels: Conservative antimarketeers and Labour pro-marketeers. The latter group were led by Roy Jenkins, deputy leader of the Labour Party, and they outnumbered the former. The principle of entry was therefore carried by 356 votes to 244 (and by a huge majority in the unelected House of Lords). At a late moment, Heath was persuaded to allow Conservative MPs a free vote. His allies assumed that this would persuade Opposition leader Harold Wilson to do the same, so that an unwhipped majority of MPs would be seen to have voted in favour of entry. The result, in partisan terms, was even better for Heath: Labour refused to remove its party whip, and yet sixty-nine Labour MPs including the deputy leader defied it, outweighing the thirty Conservatives who voted against (Jenkins 1992: chapter 17–18; Campbell 1993: chapter 20). The only whip imposed had been against entry; but the majority in favour of entry comfortably exceeded the Government’s normal majority. Heath went home and ‘played Bach’s First Prelude and Fugue for the Well-Tempered Clavier’ (E. Heath quoted in Campbell 1993: 405). The prelude is easy; the fugue is unexpectedly difficult for a piece in the key of C major. The detailed passage of the bill in early 1972 was bloodier for Heath, but thanks to the silent collusion of the Labour pro-marketeers, the government lost no votes on the Bill, which was enacted. However, Labour whipped its members to vote for an unsuccessful amendment calling for a referendum moved by two Conservative anti-marketeers, Neil Marten and Enoch Powell.

TH E M I S SI N G D IS C US S I O N O F S OV E R E I G N TY On the legal and constitution aspects of membership, the White Paper explaining the United Kingdom’s intention to apply and the ensuing parliamentary debates were therefore a whole pack of dogs that didn’t bark. Pro-marketeers, in all parties, did not want to talk about sovereignty at all, as it was their most vulnerable point with the Eurosceptic British public. Labour anti-marketeers were not interested in the issue. They cared more, in Wilson’s words, about ‘the unacceptable burdens arising out of the Common Agricultural Policy, the blows to the Commonwealth, and any threats to our essential regional policies’ (quoted in Butler and Kitzinger 1976: 17). Therefore, only the smallest of the four groups, the Conservative anti-marketeers, raised the issue, and their case suffered from the ambiguous position of their leading member.

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During the 1967 application, the Labour Government had issued a White Paper Legal and Constitutional Implications of United Kingdom Membership of the European Communities (Cmnd 3301: 1967). This document explained that the body with the power to issue directives was the Council of Ministers, operating normally by qualified majority voting, but mentioning the Luxembourg Compromise (Cmnd 3301 paragraph 14). It explained the jurisdiction of the ECJ and continued If this country became a member of the European Communities it would be accepting Community law . . . A substantial body of legislation would be required to enable us to accept the law . . . The Community law having direct internal effect is designed to take precedence over the domestic law of the Member States. From this it follows that the legislation of the Parliament of the United Kingdom giving effect to that law would have to do so in such a way as to override existing law so far as inconsistent with it. (Cmnd 3301 paragraphs 18–34, quoted at 20 and 23)

The White Paper introducing the third application was remarkably concise on these matters. They were condensed to a single paragraph in a section headed ‘The Political Case’. The material part says: The Community system rests on the original consent, and ultimately on the continuing consent, of member states and hence of national Parliaments. The English and Scottish legal systems will remain intact. Certain provisions of the treaties and instruments made under them, concerned with economic, commercial, and closely related matters, will be included in our law. The common law will remain the basis of our legal system, and our courts will continue to operate as they do at present. In certain cases however they would need to refer points of Community law to the European Court of Justice. (Cmnd 4715: paragraph 31)

In the opening debate the key Conservative anti-Market speech came from the most intellectually eminent, but most isolated, of the group, Enoch Powell. Called as the last speaker before the Opposition and Government winding-up speeches, he said: ‘I do not think the fact that this involves a cession—and a growing cession—of Parliament’s sovereignty can be disputed’, and went on to cite the previous government’s White Paper, Cmnd 3301, as his authority. He went on: What we are asked for in this House and in this country is an intention, an irrevocable decision, gradually to part with the sovereignty of this House and to commit ourselves to the merger of this nation and its destinies with the rest of the Community . . .

Winding up, Heath did not mention Powell (whom he detested) by name, but said:

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If sovereignty exists to be used and to be of value, it must be effective. We have to make a judgment whether this is the most advantageous way of using our country’s sovereignty. Sovereignty belongs to all of us, and to make that judgment we must look at the way in which the Community has actually worked during these last 12 years. In joining, we are making a commitment which involves our sovereignty, but we are also gaining an opportunity. (HC Deb 28 October 1971 vol 823 cc2076–217 quoted at 2186, 2187, and 2211)

The battle was not over for either Heath or Powell. When the Bill which became the European Communities Act 1972 was introduced, Powell grew fiercer: For this House, lacking the necessary authority either out-of-doors or indoors, legislatively to give away the independence and sovereignty of this House now and for the future is an unthinkable act. Even if there were not those outside to whom we have to render account, the very stones of this place would cry out against us if we dared such a thing. (HC Deb 17 February 1972 vol 831 cc629–761 quoted at 707)

Nevertheless, the bill passed all its stages in July 1972 and the United Kingdom joined the EU in 1973. Many lawyers since 1972 have commented on the wording of the Act. The sections on sovereignty are oblique. 2.—(1) All such rights, powers, liabilities, obligations and restrictions from time to time created or arising by or under the Treaties, and all such remedies and procedures from time to time provided for by or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the Treaties are without further enactment to be given legal effect or used in the United Kingdom shall be recognised and available in law, and be enforced, allowed and followed accordingly; and the expression ‘enforceable Community right’ and similar expressions shall be read as referring to one to which this subsection applies. (2) Subject to Schedule 2 to this Act, at any time after its passing Her Majesty may by Order in Council, and any designated Minister or department may by regulations, make provision— (a) for the purpose of implementing any Community obligation of the United Kingdom, or enabling any such obligation to be implemented, or of enabling any rights enjoyed or to be enjoyed by the United Kingdom under or by virtue of the Treaties to be exercised; or (b) for the purpose of dealing with matters arising out of or related to any such obligation or rights or the coming into force, or the operation from time to time, of subsection (1) above;

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? and in the exercise of any statutory power or duty, including any power to give directions or to legislate by means of orders, rules, regulations or other subordinate instrument, the person entrusted with the power or duty may have regard to the objects of the Communities and to any such obligation or rights as aforesaid. . . . (4) The provision that may be made under subsection (2) above includes, subject to Schedule 2 to this Act, any such provision (of any such extent) as might be made by Act of Parliament, and any enactment passed or to be passed, other than one contained in this Part of this Act, shall be construed and have effect subject to the foregoing provisions of this section; but, except as may be provided by any Act passed after this Act, Schedule 2 shall have effect in connection with the powers conferred by this and the following sections of this Act to make Orders in Council and regulations.

Section 2(1) gives Community law immediate effect in the United Kingdom, in terms that even non-lawyers can understand. It was probably a lawyer who first coined the phrase ‘the devil is in the details’—in this case in Section 2(4). Complete with its circular references to other parts and schedules of the statute, this is incomprehensible at first reading; but it is the subsection that both the ECJ and the UK courts have now used to strike down UK primary legislation. Accession day was 1 January 1973, which the Heath government declared to be the start of a ‘Festival of Europe’. It made small grants available to local groups wishing to celebrate. Opera North, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, used one of these grants to mount a spectacular performance of Purcell’s Faery Queen, whose relevance to Europe was not immediately obvious. However, the Heath government fell in February 1974, to be replaced by a minority Labour government under Wilson, whose party was as deeply split as ever on EU membership. It therefore implemented its earlier promise to renegotiate the terms of entry, and hold a national referendum on the result. This enabled Ministers to campaign on opposite sides of the issue. Collective responsibility was suspended. In March 1975, Wilson announced that the Government (meaning, in this case, a majority of Government ministers) recommended that the ‘British people [should] vote for staying in the Community’. His statement went through the seven points of renegotiation which the Labour manifesto had announced, and declared that he was satisfied on all seven. The matters covered by the 1972 Act s.2 were not among the seven (Cmnd 5999). In the referendum campaign, each household in the country was sent three leaflets. One was a Government statement recommending a Yes vote, and

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the other two were from the omnibus campaign coalitions: from Britain in Europe, also recommending a Yes, and from the National Referendum Campaign recommending a No. The theory and practice of manifesto analysis (Riker 1996; Budge et al. 2001) leads us to expect that these documents would talk past one another, each emphasizing the popular and ignoring the unpopular parts of its case. Therefore, one would expect the two Yes documents to say little or nothing about sovereignty and the No document to say a lot. This is only partly true. The Britain in Europe document says nothing about sovereignty, as predicted. The National Referendum Campaign document has a paragraph which now reads strangely: The real aim of the Market is, of course, to become one single country in which Britain would be reduced to a mere province. The plan is to have a Common Market Parliament by 1978 or shortly thereafter. Laws would be passed by that Parliament which would be binding on our country. No Parliament elected by the British people could change those laws (National Referendum Campaign 1975).

By concentrating on the European Parliament and ignoring the ECJ and the effect of the 1972 Act, the No campaigners threw away not just the ace of trumps but their entire trump suit. The EP has never threatened sovereignty (in the Diceyan sense). The ECJ and the UK courts have destroyed it. It is, surprisingly, the government statement that says most about sovereignty issues, in a somewhat defensive tone. Under the heading ‘Will Parliament Lose its Power?’ it lists four facts, or ‘facts’: Fact no. 1. is that in the modern world even the Super Powers like America and Russia do not have complete freedom of action . . . Fact no. 2. No important new policy can be decided in Brussels or anywhere else without the consent of a British Minister answerable to a British Government and British Parliament . . . Fact no. 3. The British Parliament in Westminster retains the final right to repeal the Act which took us into the Market . . . Fact no. 4. On 9 April, 1975, the House of Commons voted by 396 to 170 in favour of staying in on the new terms. (HM Government 1975: 11–12).

For Fact no. 2 to be true, the Luxembourg Compromise would have to apply to every ‘important new policy’. In other words, every such policy must be decided by unanimity, not by qualified majority vote, in the Council of Ministers. Like the Unionists in 1912 (but with better evidence), the anti-marketeers in 1975 believed that the people were on their side. Most polls since 1961 had shown a majority of British public opinion to be against the EU (Butler and

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Kitzinger 1976: chapter 10, Table 1). How then did the 1975 referendum go in favour of staying in by two to one?3 Part of the answer lies with a status quo bias. By 1975, the consequences of being an EU member seemed to be clear (even though the legal consequences were very generally unknown). The consequences of leaving were not at all clear. Always keep a hold of Nurse, For fear of finding something worse. For most people, most of the time since discussions of EU membership began, Europe has been a low-salience issue. Most people have little information on it and don’t care very much either way. There are a few very intense partisans on each side, but most people, most of the time, have too little information on which to base an opinion. This often works to the sceptics’ advantage. If a newspaper says that ‘Europe’ has forced the United Kingdom to rename Bombay Mix or to allow vultures to attack livestock, members of the public will readily assume that they are against ‘Europe’. This is such a recurrent problem for the EU and its supporters that its Press Office maintains a standing list of Euro-myths.4 But in 1975 the low salience of ‘Europe’ worked, for once, in the opposite direction. Faced with a decision about which they were bombarded with contradictory claims and felt that they had no access to unbiased information, it seems that voters took an informational short cut. What politicians were urging a Yes, and what politicians were urging a No? Table 9.1 summarizes the results. Table 9.1 shows that the politicians advocating a Yes vote were widely liked and those advocating a No vote were widely disliked. In April, when this poll was taken on behalf of the Yes organization Britain in Europe, few people knew the position on Europe of most of the politicians on the list. But the results were (as people did not say in 1975) a no-brainer for the Yes campaign. They only had to tell the public that Tony Benn, Enoch Powell, Ian Paisley, and Hugh Scanlon of the engineers’ trade union were all urging a No in order for the result to fall into their lap, as it duly did on 5 June. Table 9.1 shows that those urging Yes were centrists. Those urging No were extremists. Two of the latter (Enoch Powell and Ian Paisley) were of the far right (although different far rights). The rest were of the hard left. Voters who approved of Enoch Powell would not approve of Tony Benn, and vice versa. Therefore, voters from the right and left received conflicting signals; voters in the centre received a consistent signal. The only No advocate with a positive rating was Powell. But nobody, in 1972 or 1975, was indifferent about Enoch Powell. His rating of þ2 almost certainly included roughly equal numbers who loved him and who hated him. In 1968, Heath had dismissed him from the Shadow Cabinet for a racist speech. His popularity soared. He may, although an outcast, have helped

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Table 9.1 The UK referendum on Europe 1975: public perceptions of Yes and No advocates Supporters

Harold Wilson Edward Heath Jeremy Thorpe William Whitelaw Roy Jenkins Reginald Maudling Mean rating

Opponents

Known?

EEC position correctly perceived?

Net rating

97

75

+15

94

78

+21

91

46

+29

83

52

+25

82

39

+25

79

43

+12 21.17

Enoch Powell Ian Paisley Tony Benn Michael Foot Hugh Scanlon Jack Jones

Net rating

Known?

EEC position correctly perceived?

92

50

+2

83

18

59

81

32

15

79

33

9

75

25

17

74

22

5 17.17

Sources: Harris Poll for Britain in Europe, 1–5 April 1975, reported in Butler and Kitzinger (1976, Chapter 10, table 9); my calculations. Most familiar six on each side (from list of 20) shown.

Heath to his narrow victory in 1970. In February 1974, he urged voters to vote Labour in protest against Heath’s negotiation of entry to Europe. He may have helped Wilson to his narrow victory (for the calculations see McLean 2001a, Appendix to chapter 5). Furthermore, Powell exactly repeated Dicey’s error of 1912. Powell, like Dicey, was passionate about parliamentary sovereignty. When parliament seemed about to do something they passionately detested, Powell, like Dicey, called for a referendum. But you cannot at the same time believe wholeheartedly in parliamentary sovereignty and believe wholeheartedly in the referendum. If either Powell or Dicey had felt able to come out in favour of ‘us the people’—in favour of popular sovereignty—they would have been rescued from contradiction. But this would have revealed that parliamentary sovereignty, whatever its value as a legal doctrine, has none as an ethical doctrine. Powell misplayed his hand for another reason also. In 1963, the threat to Parliamentary sovereignty had already been stated in an ECJ judgment that all public lawyers now hold to be the Marbury v. Madison of that court.5 In the Van Gend en Loos case of 1963, the Court ruled (in the English version):

192

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? The European Economic Community constitutes a new legal order of international law for the benefit of which the states have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited fields, and the subjects of which comprise not only the member states but also their nationals. Independently of the legislation of member states, community law not only imposes obligations on individuals but is also intended to confer upon them rights which become part of their legal heritage. These rights arise not only where they are expressly granted by the treaty but also by reason of obligations which the treaty imposes in a clearly defined way upon individuals as well as upon the member states and upon the institutions of the Community.

By joining the EU, the United Kingdom was signing up to this judgment.6 Between 1971 and 1975, some of the Yes advocates, including Ministers and Parliamentary draftsmen, knew this but held their peace in Parliament. Once the 1972 Act was in the bag, the junior minister Geoffrey Howe was remarkably frank in a speech later published in an academic journal: Consider for a moment the key provision, to be found in Section 2 (4) of the Act [section then quoted] . . . What the Act seeks to do . . . is to enjoin our courts, in their interpretation of future legislation, to give full effect to the concept of ‘enforceable Community rights’ which, as defined in Section 2 (1) (and the treaties) contains the element of supremacy. (Howe 1973: 7)

Immediately before this passage, Howe praises the Parliamentary draftsmen for their ingenuity in drafting the wording of s.2 in order to reconcile the supremacy of Community law with the Diceyan tradition. It seems that the draftsmen even outwitted Enoch Powell. The phrase ‘Van Gend’ appears in Hansard online a total of thirteen times.7 Disregarding one mention of the company that was not about its lawsuit gives twelve mentions, six of which were in the 1972 debates. On each occasion in the Commons, the Solicitor-General (the same Geoffrey Howe) fended off the attacks of the two Conservative MPs who persistently raised the issue, Powell and Sir Derek Walker-Smith. Powell and Walker-Smith had the logic but not the numbers on their side. Howe’s lecture correctly anticipated the next flashpoint, which would occur when he was a senior minister in the Conservative administration of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90). If the Common Market was to be an effective common market, it must enforce open market rules on all member states (Howe 1973: 2). It was this that had provoked de Gaulle’s walkout, and therefore the Luxembourg Compromise. De Gaulle had walked out in order to prevent a qualified majority of member states from voting in the Council of Ministers to reduce the market-distorting protection received by French farmers. Qualified-majority therefore enters, centre stage.

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Votes in the Council of Ministers are cast in member state blocs. Each member state has a bloc of votes that is roughly proportionate to the square root of its population.8 A proposal gains qualified-majority approval if the number of votes in its favour passes the current threshold, which has hovered between 67 and 70 per cent of the weighted votes in the Council, changing slightly as the thresholds are reset at each enlargement of the EU. A proposal gets unanimity approval, obviously, only if every single member state supports it at the Council. The Luxembourg Compromise prescribed the unanimity rule for everything that any member state claimed affected its vital interests. To British Conservatives and other (confusingly but correctly labelled) economic liberals, the point of the EC/EU was to create an internal market without trade, regulatory, or tariff barriers, so that intra-Community trade would grow and protection for sub-Community economic interests would disappear. For them, the EU treaties are a matter of jurisdictional integration exactly like the Acts of Union of 1707. However, unlike 1707, the Treaty of Rome does not create a single state. True, the Commission could impose internal free trade by relying on the Van Gend principle to insist that Community free-trading regulations trumped Member State protectionist rules. But in the 1980s both the Commission and a number of Member State governments decided that economic integration was going too slowly, because under the Luxembourg Compromise it remained at the mercy of French farmers and other single-country protectionist lobbies. The next cession of British sovereignty was initiated by the Single European Act of 1986 and completed by the Maastricht Treaty of 1991. The three main actors were a very ill-matched trio: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; UK EU Commissioner Lord Cockfield,9 and Commission President Jacques Delors. Two of the three (Thatcher and Cockfield) were economic liberals who believed, in principle (Cockfield in practice), in removing barriers to the single market. Two of the three (Cockfield and Delors) believed in the reinvigoration of the EU, although Delors ‘was no friend of economic or political liberalism’ (Gillingham 2003: 160). When Mrs Thatcher sent Cockfield to Brussels as UK Commissioner in 1984, it was probably in order to get rid of an intransigent minister who had been proved right too often for his own good. The obituaries portray a slowmoving, slow-talking, fiercely intelligent man of remorseless humourless logic. She thought she had sent a fellow Eurosceptic to Brussels and was horrified when she found that, as she put it, he had ‘gone native’. Cockfield’s view was that it was his mission to extend to the EU the economic liberalism and deregulation that Thatcher had inaugurated in the United Kingdom. He therefore produced a White Paper listing nearly 300 moves to dismantle

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non-tariff barriers impeding a free internal market, with a date for implementation beside each. Although Delors’s economics was light years away from Cockfield’s (see e.g. Gillingham 2003: 160–1), they shared a vision of reenergizing the EU. For Cockfield, this was instrumental—a means to the end of extending the single market. For Delors, it was primordial—a more powerful EU was an end in itself. The Single European Act (SEA: so named rather confusingly) is not an Act of the UK (or any other) parliament, but an EU treaty drafted by Cockfield. It was adopted by each Member State in 1986 and came into force in 1987. The main provision relevant to this chapter is that it extended qualified majority voting (QMV) to measures that would help to implement the single European market. In other words, it would remove all single-nation vetoes— French, British, and any other—on market-integration measures approved by a qualified majority of member states in the Council of Ministers. In those matters, it therefore superseded the Luxembourg Compromise and invalidated Fact 2 put forward by the Wilson government in 1975 (see above). Because the SEA was a constitutional treaty ratified by the United Kingdom, the Thatcher government decided to enact a UK statute to confirm it. This was the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1986 c.58, whose preamble announces its purpose as: An Act to amend the European Communities Act 1972 so as to include in the definition of ‘the Treaties’ and ‘the Community Treaties’ certain provisions of the Single European Act signed at Luxembourg and The Hague on 17th and 28th February 1986 and extend certain provisions relating to the European Court to any court attached thereto; and to amend references to the Assembly of the European Communities and approve the Single European Act.

The UK Act itself was very brief. But it had the effect of approving a new Article 100a of the Treaties of European Union, which extended QMV to single-market measures. As in 1950 and 1971–2, therefore, the question arises: did the House of Commons know what it was doing when it enacted the 1986 Act? The most relevant debate is on a guillotine motion on 1 July 1986. Since 1975, Euroscepticism had strengthened considerably in the Conservative Party, and it no longer depended on Enoch Powell (still in the Commons, but as Ulster Unionist MP for South Down). Labour anti-marketeers were also more effective. The veteran anti-EU Labour MP Peter Shore made a much more telling speech than in 1972: What is special about the Bill is that it gives legislative effect to a treaty concluded with other nations—the member states of the EEC—and upon whose institutions it confers additional legislative powers. Once passed, this

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measure cannot be repealed by a subsequent Parliament, unless that Parliament is prepared to tear up the underlying treaty itself—a special dimension of difficulty which I do not believe many Conservative Members have even given serious thought to. Moreover, it is a Bill that directly affects the power of Parliament . . . The powers of the United Kingdom Parliament will he weakened in two principal ways: first, because, as a result of amendments to the Rome treaty, qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers will be substituted for unanimity voting in five important articles of the Rome treaty and, secondly, because it introduces the new so-called “co-operation” procedure between the European Assembly and the Council of Ministers which will remove the national veto from a wide range of Council decisions and permit the Council to reject amendments by the European Assembly only if the Council itself is unanimous . . . The veto power in the Council of Ministers has been the central defence of British national interests. During the referendum campaign in 1975, the then Government, supported by the Conservative Opposition, sought to comfort the sceptical British electorate with this categorical statement—I quote from the document “Britain’s New Deal in Europe”—no important new policy can be decided in Brussels or anywhere else without the consent of a British Minister answerable to a British Government and British Parliament.

To this onslaught the minister, Lynda Chalker, blandly appealed to the Luxembourg Compromise: Its role is in no way changed by the Single European Act. In any case, it is not the Luxembourg compromise on which we have relied to safeguard our interests. Where we need to retain unanimity we have done so, and where we need national safeguards we have secured them, too.

Why then, in the face of better-informed concerns about sovereignty than in 1972, did the guillotine motion carry comfortably and the Bill proceed rapidly to enactment? Because the Conservatives had a large majority sufficient to overwhelm their own doubters and the entire Opposition. Enoch Powell, quoting his fellow Parliamentary outrider Denis Skinner (the hardleft Labour member for Bolsover), drew attention to the oddity of Mrs Thatcher’s position: The hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner), in a speech which delighted the House last Friday, drew attention to a curious anomaly which had engaged his notice, namely, that the Prime Minister was, to all appearances, strongly opposed to the step which we are invited to embody in United Kingdom legislation. The Prime Minister had stated publicly and repeatedly

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? that no such treaty was necessary, and that for the purposes and interests of the United Kingdom in the Common Market no such legislation as this to embody that treaty would be called for. Nevertheless, the hon. Member for Bolsover pointed out, she went along and signed. (HC Deb 01 July 1986 vol 100 cc930–82 quoted at 937, 974, 945)

The oddity of her position is stressed by Lord Cockfield after she had cast him into outer darkness. He seemed particularly pained not to have been invited to the 1992 celebrations inaugurating the single market which he had created. Here, albeit yoked together from disparate points in his account, is his digested view of Mrs Thatcher: The publication of the White Paper marked the first days in the deterioration of my relations with the Prime Minister . . . [T]he most powerful support I enjoyed in the Community was the Prime Minister’s hostility. . . [D]espite Mrs Thatcher’s efforts we did get [qualified] majority voting and as a result we have now seen the successful completion of the Internal Market Programme . . . Her support of . . . the Single Market . . . was largely based on a misunderstanding. (quoted in Cockfield 1994: 55, 59, 64, 135. For the 1992 disinvitation see page 93)

After she had been re-elected with a reduced but still substantial majority, the Merchant Shipping Bill 1988 contained clauses that would prevent Spanish fishing companies from what was called ‘quota-hopping’. Fish stocks all round the EU were dwindling because of a classic ‘tragedy of the Commons’—every fishing boat was overfishing and contributing to stock declines—even though fishermen knew that stocks were declining through overfishing. Nevertheless, it was in the interest of each boat to overfish—a skipper who unilaterally declined to overfish would be a sucker and would soon be out of business. This is one of the issues that a supranational body is better equipped to handle than a national government because the scale of the tragedy is supranational, and fish do not observe national boundaries. Nevertheless, EU quotas limiting catches were deeply unpopular with fishing lobbies, which in the United Kingdom were concentrated in a small number of marginal seats, notably in Cornwall and Devon. These fishermen were enraged by the fact that Spanish fishing companies were buying up British boats to catch not fish but quotas, a practice that Adam Smith had noticed two centuries earlier.10 The Merchant Shipping Act 1988 c.12, as finally enacted, required at s.14 that: (1) Subject to subsections (3) and (4), a fishing vessel shall only be eligible to be registered as a British fishing vessel if—

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(a) the vessel is British-owned; (b) the vessel is managed, and its operations are directed and controlled, from within the United Kingdom; and (c) any charterer, manager or operator of the vessel is a qualified person or company. Even in the Parliamentary debates, the Government was warned that this was probably unlawful under European law (HL Deb 24 November 1987 vol 490 cc 553–94, speech of Lord Parry at 575). It introduced one of those non-tariff barriers that Mrs Thatcher’s man in Europe, Lord Cockfield, was devoting his energies to removing. Cockfield was himself removed by non-reappointment in 1989. Like other politicians, it seemed that Mrs Thatcher was in favour of removing non-tariff barriers except when a key interest group (key, in this case, because Falmouth and St Ives were marginal Conservative seats) wanted them. In this she was identical to General de Gaulle.

T H E C O U RT S S T E P I N However, unlike General de Gaulle, she had to contend with two things: qualified majority rule in the Council of Ministers on market-opening measures, and the ECJ. The latter attacked first. We have already referred to the Factortame litigation (Chapter 6). The aggrieved Spanish companies, one of which was called Factortame, went to court. Initially, the UK courts referred to the ECJ the question whether an ‘overriding principle of Community law’ entitled the Spanish companies to seek compensation for the losses they would incur if the 1988 Act was enforced against them. The ECJ duly said that it did. The result was Factortame (no. 2), in which the House of Lords granted the injunction sought by the Spaniards against removing their ships from the register of British fishing vessels. But this required, for the first time since 1707, the clear ‘disapplication’ of a statute enacted by Parliament. Let us have another look at what I earlier described as ‘Lord Bridge’s fig-leaf ’. If the supremacy within the European Community of Community law over the national law of member states was not always inherent in the E.E.C. Treaty (Cmnd 5179-II), it was certainly well established in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice long before the United Kingdom joined the Community. Thus, whatever limitation of its sovereignty Parliament accepted when it enacted the European Communities Act 1972 was entirely voluntary . . . [W]hen decisions of the European Court of Justice have

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? exposed areas of United Kingdom statute law which failed to implement Council directives, Parliament has always loyally accepted the obligation to make appropriate and prompt amendments. (R. v. Secretary of State for Transport, ex parte Factortame Ltd and Others (No. 2) [1991] 1. A.C. 603 at 658–9)

This may be good law; but it is bad history, as my survey of the 1971–2 debates shows. Parliament ‘voluntarily’ accepted limitation of its sovereignty only because two crusty Conservative backbenchers (Walker-Smith and Powell) were too isolated, even or especially in their own party, to get Parliament to take their concerns seriously. The other EU case recognized by all public lawyers as raising profound constitutional questions is Thoburn v. Sunderland City Council, [2002] 3 WLR 247. Thoburn was one of a number of self-styled ‘metric martyrs’. He was a greengrocer in Sunderland who had been fined for failing to weigh bananas by the kilo, as required by an EU directive implemented by various UK regulations. His counsel argued that the UK Weights and Measures Act 1985, which consolidated previous law on the subject, implicitly repealed s.2 of the European Communities Act 1972 in relation to the retention of pounds and yards. The 1985 Act restated earlier statutes affirming that imperial weights and measures continued to be valid in the United Kingdom. Thus, exactly as Dicey argued that the Dentists Act 1878 might have partly repealed the Acts of Union 1706/7, so Thoburn’s counsel argued that the 1985 Act partly repealed the 1972 one, and therefore that directives implemented by post-1985 statutory instruments, purporting to make metric measurements primary, were invalid. The courts would have none of this. The key judgment was delivered by Sir John Laws, a judge who already had a reputation as a constitutionalist. He could have used similar reasoning to that of Bridge in Factortame to the effect the EU law overrode any UK law to the contrary. Actually, he did something quite different. He discovered a principle of the common law according to which, he said, constitutional statutes must be treated differently to ordinary ones: We should recognise a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament: as it were “ordinary” statutes and “constitutional” statutes. The two categories must be distinguished on a principled basis. In my opinion a constitutional statute is one which (a) conditions the legal relationship between citizen and state in some general, overarching manner, or (b) enlarges or diminishes the scope of what we would now regard as fundamental constitutional rights. (a) and (b) are of necessity closely related: it is difficult to think of an instance of (a) that is not also an instance of (b). The special status of constitutional statutes follows the special status of constitutional rights. Examples are Magna Carta 1297 (25 Edw 1), the Bill of Rights 1689 (1 Will & Mary

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sess 2 c 2), the Union with Scotland Act 1706 (6 Anne c 11), the Reform Acts which distributed and enlarged the franchise (Representation of the People Acts 1832 (2 & 3 Will 4 c 45), 1867 (30 & 31 Vict c 102) and 1884 (48 & 49 Vict c 3)), the Human Rights Act 1998, the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 1998. The 1972 [European Communities] Act clearly belongs in this family . . . The 1972 Act is, by force of the common law, a constitutional statute. Ordinary statutes may be impliedly repealed. Constitutional statutes may not . . . This development of the common law regarding constitutional rights, and as I would say constitutional statutes, is highly beneficial. It gives us most of the benefits of a written constitution, in which fundamental rights are accorded special respect. But it preserves the sovereignty of the legislature and the flexibility of our uncodified constitution. (Thoburn v. Sunderland City Council, [2002] 3 WLR 247, Laws LJ quoted at paragraphs 62–4 my emphasis)

Some commentators have heartily disapproved of Laws’s reasoning, regarding it as judicial law-making. But it has been emulated in non-EU cases including the hunting case Jackson mentioned in Chapter 6. Between them, Bridge and Laws have killed parliamentary sovereignty in relation to the EU. What should go in its place? I can only return to this question at the end of this book, but have already dropped broad hints that we need some conception of popular sovereignty. For all the twists and turns, incompetence and misinformation, that this chapter has chronicled, Parliament did ratify the United Kingdom’s treaties of accession to the EU and subsequent amending treaties including the Single European Act. The accession was ratified by a two-thirds majority of the voters in the only UK nationwide referendum. Parliament undoubtedly could legislate to leave the EU, as it could legislate to change the shape of the United Kingdom by ceding Scotland or Northern Ireland. At the end of this book I will try to imagine how ‘our, the people’s’ constitution might deal with those matters.

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10 Human Rights THE COUNCIL AND THE CONVENTION As already noted, the Council of Europe antedates the European Union. In 1945, the United Kingdom was the hegemonic Western European power. France had been liberated only in 1944; Italy, the Low Countries, and Germany in 1945. The towering British politician of the day was Winston Churchill. Pushed into opposition by the UK General Election of July 1945, he transferred some of his energy to rebuilding Europe. In 1946, at Zurich, he called for a ‘United States of Europe’ although he refused to become involved in writing the constitution of these united states (Crowson 2007: 15). Nevertheless, ten Western European governments formed the Council of Europe in 1949. The inaugural members were five of the six that were to form the European Communities shortly afterwards (not Germany, still emerging from multi-power occupation), plus the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The UK government did not ratify the accession treaty, but the initial months of the Council were discussed at an adjournment debate in November 1949, at which Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin made it clear that the UK Government were not willing to let the Council acquire any supranational powers (HC Deb 17 November 1949 vol 469 cc2202–338). The future EU member states soon became dissatisfied with the limited scope of the Council. Their progress towards what became the EU has already been discussed. But the Council of Europe did not close down. One of its first acts was to draft a European Convention on Human Rights. The chair of the committee that produced it was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a British Conservative former minister who had been the deputy (but de facto chief) British prosecutor in the Nuremburg trials of German Nazi war criminals. His Labour counterpart, Sir Hartley Shawcross, had brought Fyfe to Nuremburg to show that prosecution of Nazi war crimes was bipartisan in the United Kingdom. The Convention was one of many instruments designed to ensure that Nazism could never rise again in Europe. As the status of the Nuremburg Tribunal was (and is) disputed, it made sense that the Convention should

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acquire a Commission to explore and a Court to try violations of human rights. The Convention was ratified by twelve governments including (in 1951) the United Kingdom. It entered into force in 1953 on receiving the requisite number of ratifications. In the 1950 Commons debate the Conservative spokesman Duncan Sandys (son-in-law of Winston Churchill), contrasting the European Convention with the non-binding UN Declaration of Human Rights, said: It was felt at Strasbourg that what at present would not be feasible on a worldwide scale is none the less possible and necessary within the circle of the Western European democracies. The European Convention of Human Rights, which was signed in Rome the other day by the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on behalf of this country, is a very different thing from the United Nations declaration. In the first place, it is confined to a very small number of vital and fundamental rights, which are the foundation of our Western way of life. Nor is it not just a declaration. It is a binding treaty which imposes the obligation on all the signatory States, to assure to their citizens the rights which it contains. What perhaps is the most novel and important feature of this Convention is the provision for the setting up of a European Court of Human Rights, to which cases of alleged infringement of the Convention can be referred for adjudication. (HC Deb 13 November 1950 vol 480 cc1391–504 quoted at 1412)

He urged the Labour government to sign up to the Court’s jurisdiction. Bevin was unwilling to do so on the spot. In fact, the United Kingdom has accepted the jurisdiction of the Court in stages. Initially, only member states had access to the court. The United Kingdom permitted individual access to the Commission in 1966 (as an executive act, without parliamentary discussion or ratification: Lester and Beattie 2007: 63). However, from then until the UK Human Rights Act 1998 came into force, in 2000, aggrieved individuals had to trek to Strasbourg to claim a violation of their human rights. Not many did or could.

AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SECESSION To understand the format of human rights protection in the United Kingdom, and the policy options open to a future government, it is useful to understand how the movement for human rights, originating in seventeenth-century England, flowed after 1787 into two distinct streams. Many of the leaders of the American Revolution were lawyers, trained in the United Kingdom (often in Scotland) or in American universities where

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they were taught by Scots. Of the Framers of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson, James Wilson, and James Madison are all cases in point. Wilson was educated in Scotland, and both Madison and Jefferson were taught by Scots professors. After 1707, it was natural for Scottish intellectuals to be ‘country’ or ‘opposition’ Whigs. They were Whigs because they appreciated the liberation from both hellfire and Jacobite rebellion that the Union had brought them (McLean 2006). But they were country Whigs because they tended to suspect the Court, the London government, and its business managers. The ideology of country Whiggery was well defined by the 1770s, mixing history and myth. According to the mythical part, freeborn Englishmen had been crushed by the Norman yoke in 1066. They had started to re-establish their rights with Magna Carta in 1215, but did not start to regain them in earnest until the seventeenth century. Then, first the common lawyers and later Parliament stood up for the freeborn English against Stuart absolutism. The first expression of this as a democratic ideal was by Col. Thomas Rainborough and the Levellers in the Putney Debates of 1647 (‘the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee’: Sharp 1998: 103). But Rainborough was unknown to the American revolutionaries. He was only rediscovered in 1890. Therefore, its best-known formulation was by John Locke, whose Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, is now known to have been written before the revolution of 1688, which it sought to justify by arguing that government existed only by consent, which James II had forfeited. The American revolutionaries took their legal and political philosophy from this country Whig tradition. Its most eloquent exponent was Thomas Jefferson. In the last letter he ever wrote, the sick Jefferson excused himself from attending the 4 July 1826 celebrations in Washington DC (he was actually to die on that day), but wrote as his testament to the Mayor of Washington: May it [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. (TJ to Roger C. Weightman, 24.06.1826 in Peterson 1984: 1517)

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Douglass Adair (1974: 192–202) has proved that the striking image of ‘saddles on their backs’ comes from the dying speech of Col. Richard Rumbold, a former Parliamentarian executed for rebellion against James II in 1685. Although he did not know it, Jefferson was at only one remove from Rainborough. Rumbold had been a supporter of the Levellers. The dominant country Whig ideology among the American Framers therefore led them in 1787 to write a constitution that was distinctly suspicious of the executive, incorporating a number of individual rights against the government: for instance restricting the scope of impeachment; giving the monopoly of supply to the lower house of Congress; protecting habeas corpus; and outlawing bills of attainder and ex post facto [retrospective] laws (US Constitution I.3; I.7; I.9). It was not enough for the country Whigs of several states, nor for Thomas Jefferson, by then in Paris as American Minister: ‘I will now add what I do not like. First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact’ (TJ to James Madison, 20.12.1787 in Peterson 1984: 915–16). Several state conventions signalled that they would not ratify the Constitution unless a Bill of Rights were added, containing among others the items listed by Jefferson. It was done. Madison was the floor manager of what became the Bill of Rights, namely, the first ten amendments of the Constitution, ratified together in 1791. The Bill of Rights entrenched further individual rights against the state: for instance, freedom of speech and religion (First Amendment); the right to bear arms (Second Amendment); no searches without warrant (Fourth Amendment); a right against self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment); and a ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ (Eighth Amendment: a phrase lifted direct from the English Bill of Rights Act 1689). In France, too, human rights were enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen promulgated in 1789, and now incorporated into the preamble of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. Elsewhere, I have pointed out how the fingerprints of Thomas Jefferson are all over this document (McLean 2004). This is rarely acknowledged by either American scholars (who do not read French) or French scholars (unwilling to admit that an American helped to draft their sacred document) but can easily be traced through the letters of the disloyal American Minister in Paris: disloyal, that is, to the regime of Louis XVI to which he was accredited. Thus, country Whig ideology flowed into both the American and French declarations of human rights. The American declaration has always been entrenched in the Constitution. The French declaration was not entrenched

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until 1971, when the Conseil constitutionnel decided for the first time that the rights it set out were justiciable (Stone Sweet 2000). By the 1790s, anything popular in France (or even the United States) was anathema to most politicians and thinkers in the United Kingdom. Britain was at war with France for most of the time from 1792 to 1815. The bloody course of the French Revolution led to an understandably hostile reaction to the Enlightenment. Neither the US nor the French declarations of rights had much intellectual support, even though both of them had developed from English and Scottish thought. Legal positivism came to dominate lawyers’ thinking about the British constitution. A landmark in this was Jeremy Bentham’s dismissal of rights in Anarchical Fallacies, a savage attack on the 1791 version of the French declaration of the rights of man—and hence, indirectly, on Jefferson. ‘Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts’ (Bowring 1843: 501). His follower John Austin applied Benthamite positivism in The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832/1861). For legal positivists, there was necessarily a single sovereign: ‘Supreme power limited by positive law, is a flat contradiction in terms’, said Austin (1832: 225). Until very recently, British legal thinking was almost all conducted in the shadow of Bentham and Austin. Dicey came to throw an even deeper shadow of his own. As noted in various places in this book, Dicey still has his followers. So does Bentham—the most eminent modern Benthamite probably being Professor John Griffith, for whom ‘the constitution is what happens’ (quoted in King 2007: 4). For a socio-legal scholar like Griffith, the ‘constitution’ is simply the result of fights between elected politicians and unelected judges. Griffith is on the side of the politicians because he distrusts the class composition of the judicial bench. Even Dicey’s most biting critic among English constitutional lawyers, Sir Ivor Jennings, still sailed down the other branch of the seventeenth-century Whig stream—call it the ‘court’ branch. ‘Court’ and ‘country’ were the main party labels in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. After the Jacobite rebellions, no politician dared to call himself a Tory. They were all Whigs. They all celebrated the parliamentary revolt against Charles I and the Glorious Revolution. Country Whigs in Scotland and America read the tradition as one of constraints on rulers who violated fundamental rights. Court Whigs read it differently. For them, what happened in 1688–9 is that Parliament inherited all the prerogative powers of the Crown. The monarch (both branches of Whigs agreed) reigned only by consent of the two Parliaments that had separately invited William III to be the monarch, and the post-Union parliament which finally confirmed the Hanoverian succession. Therefore (court Whigs continued), the royal prerogative is exercised by ministers on behalf of the Crown. When the monarch

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becomes involved, he acts only on the advice of his ministers (see, once again, Asquith’s letters to George V). But the everyday exercise of the prerogative, to get things done, does not even require reference to the monarch. Sir Ivor Jennings was therefore a comfortably a court Whig for the wartime and postwar governments which vastly expanded executive power. It was all done in the name of the Crown. Beginning, perhaps, with Asquith, court Whigs added that they represented the elected house of Parliament, and therefore the people. When the Crown (i.e. ministers) used its prerogative, it was acting (i.e. they were acting) ultimately in the name of the people. In this perspective, entrenched rights are counter-majoritarian. What right have unelected judges got to strike down the acts of elected ministers? A rights culture did not return to UK constitutional thinking, therefore, until it arrived by the backdoor route of opening individual access to the European Court of Human Rights. Since then, there has been a human rights revolution in the UK constitution: cheered by some, deplored by others.

THE ROAD TO AND FROM THE HUMAN RIGHTS AC T The narrative that follows depends heavily on Lester and Beattie (2007). This authoritative source is co-authored by one of the people who has done most to bring human rights into the British constitution, and explains why and how the legislation has taken the (to a non-lawyer) unexpected form that it has. When the Wilson Labour government allowed individual access to the European Court of Human Rights, it may have seemed a small decision. The human rights court had decided only two cases, because hardly any states had yet accepted its jurisdiction. After 1966, it started to find against all three branches of UK government—legislative, executive, and judicial. For instance, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968 was held to have breached the Convention rights of British Asian passport holders from East Africa; the Home Secretary was held to have breached the Convention rights of prisoners; and the Law Lords were held to have breached the right of free expression in a judgment preventing the Sunday Times from publishing articles about thalidomide, a wonder drug that had gone disastrously wrong (Lester and Beattie 2007: 64). A few lawyers headed by Antony (Lord) Lester started to lobby for incorporation of the ECHR into UK law as early as the 1960s. Home Secretary Roy Jenkins published a consultation paper on it in 1976;1 the Liberal and Labour

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parties had adopted it as policy by 1993. In 1994, Lord Lester introduced the first bill to incorporate the ECHR into UK law. This bill would have taken the same route as the ECJ had by then enforced in relation to EU law. However, advised by senior judges that, although they supported the principle of incorporation, another attack on parliamentary sovereignty was likely to fail, Lester introduced a second bill modelled on an earlier New Zealand statute requiring judges to interpret legislation in a way that was compatible with Convention rights, whenever possible. The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 states at s.4: No court shall, in relation to any enactment (whether passed before or after the commencement of the Bill of Rights): (a) Hold any provision of the enactment to be impliedly repealed or revoked, or to be in any way invalid or ineffective; or (b) Decline to apply any provision of the enactment by reason only that the provision is inconsistent with any provision of this Bill of Rights. (quoted in Lester and Beattie 2007: 67 note 28)

Lester’s 1996 bill failed, but his approach was adopted by the incoming Labour government in 1997, when he again became a government adviser. Labour prepared its ground on the assumption that it might need a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the party most in favour of incorporation. The parliamentary arithmetic of 1997, however, meant that Labour went it alone. Introducing the Bill which became the Human Rights Act 1998, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Irvine of Lairg, said: I look forward especially to the contribution today of the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill. His major role in the development of the antidiscrimination legislation of the 1970s under the future Lord Jenkins of Hillhead is well known. I should also acknowledge from this position, as did the White Paper,2 that he has perhaps for 30 years been a tireless campaigner for legislation on human rights. His has not been a silent but an eloquent vigil, and his day has now almost arrived . . . This Bill will bring human rights home. People will be able to argue for their rights and claim their remedies under the convention in any court or tribunal in the United Kingdom. Our courts will develop human rights throughout society. A culture of awareness of human rights will develop. Before Second Reading of any Bill the responsible Minister will make a statement that the Bill is or is not compatible with convention rights . . . Our critics say the Bill will cede powers to Europe, will politicise the judiciary and will diminish parliamentary sovereignty. We are not ceding new powers to Europe. The United Kingdom already accepts that

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Since the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998, all except one of the main legal systems that derived from seventeenth-century England have incorporated human rights and to some extent restricted parliamentary sovereignty. The United States did so in 1791. Canada did so in 1982, when it enacted the Canada Charter of Rights and Freedoms as part of the process of patriating the Canadian constitution. Human rights are therefore entrenched unless the federal or a provincial government uses the ‘notwithstanding clause’ (s.33 of the Charter) to override some of the protected rights for a maximum of five years. This preserves at least a shadow of parliamentary sovereignty. It has been used a handful of times by provincial governments, and never to date by the federal government. India enacted some ‘fundamental rights’ into Part III of its Constitution in 1950. The then Attorney General of India explained in 2004 that all pre-independence constitution drafts drafted either by Indians or by their British sympathizers had included rights protection. The (British) Simon Commission of 1930 had dismissed the idea. Therefore, it was natural for India to adopt entrenched rights at independence (Sorabjee 2004). India also created a Human Rights Commission in 1993.3 The South African Constitution of 1996 incorporates a bill of rights, which states at s.39(2), ‘When interpreting any legislation, and when developing the common law or customary law, every court, tribunal or forum must promote the spirit, purport and objects of the Bill of Rights.’ The Republic of Ireland incorporated the ECHR into domestic law by its European Convention on Human Rights Act 2003. This Act is modelled on the UK statute, and provides for declarations of incompatibility on similar lines. The only Anglophone common-law legal system that descends from the Glorious Revolution but has not enacted a bill of Rights at federal level is Australia. There was discussion at the time of Federation of incorporation of a US-style bill of rights, but this did not prevail. Recently, the states of Victoria and ACT have adopted Bills of Rights at state level (Justice 2007).

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Of these Anglophone systems, therefore, the United States has the strongest entrenchment; Canada the next strongest; and the others try to reconcile the principles of entrenched rights and of parliamentary sovereignty in various ways—very similar ways in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, which copied one another’s statutes. Young (2009: 2) argues that the format of the act ‘facilitates inter-institutional dialogue between the legislature and the courts’. What form has that dialogue taken? Not all states that have signed the ECHR are required to adopt all of its clauses and protocols. The Convention and those of its Protocols currently (autumn 2008) ratified by the United Kingdom are in the Appendix to this chapter. Some of the rights they confer are unqualified, for example, the prohibition of torture in Article 2 and of slavery in Article 3. Others are qualified by wording such as the typical sub-paragraph 2 of Article 9 on freedom of religion: 2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Freedom of religion is absolute; freedom to manifest one’s religion is qualified. Thus, several UK (and other) attempts to use Article 9 to overturn school and employment dress codes to allow religious observers to wear, variously, a jilbab, niqab, or ‘purity ring’4 have failed because the freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs is not unqualified. Section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 states: So far as it is possible to do so, primary legislation and subordinate legislation must be read and given effect in a way which is compatible with the Convention rights.

Where a court decides that it is not possible to do so, it may issue a declaration of incompatibility (Table 10.1). These procedures constitute the mechanism by which Parliament and the courts display what Young and other lawyers call ‘comity’ to one another: ‘Comity between the legislature and the courts not only furthers stability, but instigates a form of checks and balances between the legislature and the courts’ (Young 2009: 172). By ‘comity’ she means respectful collaboration: a mutual recognition by each that the other is better placed to do dome of the things in their joint territory. The Canadian lawyer Janet Hiebert (1996, 2002) has explored this in her studies of the relationship between the Canadian Parliament and courts in the interpretation of the weakly entrenched Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter itself defers to the legislature in two places. Section

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33 allows a legislature to pass time-limited laws ‘notwithstanding’ an avowed incompatibility with Charter rights. Section 1 states: The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

When a law seemed to conflict with a Charter right, Canadian judges therefore had to decide how far to defer to the legislature’s view of what is reasonable. They have recognized that it may be dangerous to impose their view of reasonability over the legislature’s. Returning to the equivalent UK problem with Convention rights, Young states, ‘although courts can interpret legislation to achieve compatibility, they cannot question or overturn legislation that is incompatible with Convention rights’ (2009: 4). The Ministry of Justice has tabulated all the declarations in force as at January 2009 (Table 10.1). Table 10.1 shows that of the fifteen declarations in force, six concerned immigration, asylum, or terrorism issues; three concerned mental health; two the rights of convicted criminals; and four the personal rights of small (and unpopular) groups of citizens such as social workers and those convicted of attempted buggery in Northern Ireland. This encapsulates the political problem of human rights. The humans whose rights are likeliest to be violated are those with whom the median voter has little sympathy. Probably the only case in Table 10.1 of which this is not true is #6, which led to the Human

Table 10.1 Declarations of incompatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights issued by UK courts since entry into force of the Human Rights Act 1998.

Subject 1

2

3

Date D of I issued

Statute declared incompatible with ECHR

Result to Jan. 2009

Mental health— discharge from hospital ‘attempted buggery’— N. Ireland

28.03.01

Mental Health Act 1983 s.72, s.73

Amended

15.01.02

Repealed

Penalties on carriers unknowingly transporting clandestine entrants to the United Kingdom

22.02.02

Offences against the Person act 1861 s.62 Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 Part II

Amended

Human Rights

Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 s.29 Mental Health Act 1983 s.74

Repealed

Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 s. 28(6)(b) Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 s.11(c) Mental Health Act 1983 s.26, s.29

Amended

Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 s.23 Housing Act 1996 s.185(4)

Derogation quashed; section replaced

28.03.06

As #10

As #10

10.04.06; 16.06.06

Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004 s.19(3)

21.01.09 (date of reinstatement of DoI by Lords) 13.12.06

Care Standards Act 2000 s.82(4) (b)

Scope of DoI restricted by higher court. ‘The Government is considering how to rectify the [remaining] incompatibility’ ‘The Government is considering how to rectify the incompatibility’

Criminal Justice Act 1991 s.46(1) and 50(2)

Amended

24.01.07

Representation of the People Act 1983 s.3(1)

‘The Government is currently engaged in a process of consultation

4

Sec. of State’s power to set minimum life tariff

25.11.02

5

Discretionary life prisoner—access to court Deceased father’s name not allowable on birth certificate

19.12.02

Validity of marriage of post-op. D-to-B transsexual Designation of abusive adoptive father as ‘nearest relative’ of mental patient Detention of foreign nationals: derogation from ECHR Article 5 (1) Disregarding dependent children subject to immigration control in determining eligibility for social housing As #10 but with respect to pregnant wife Anti-sham marriage procedures for persons subject to immigration control

10.04.03

13

Listing care workers as unsuitable to work with vulnerable adults

14

Early release provisions for prisoners that discriminate by national origin

15

Blanket ban on convicted prisoners voting in

6

7

8

9

10

11 12

211

28.02.03

16.04.03

16.12.04

14.10.05

Amended

Amended

Amended

Amended; relevant Schedule not yet in force

(continued )

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Table 10.1 (Continued)

Subject Parliamentary elections

Date D of I issued

Statute declared incompatible with ECHR

Result to Jan. 2009 on how to respond . . . so as to provide the public debate on this issue that had been identified as lacking’.

Sources: http://www.dca.gov.uk/peoples-rights/human-rights/pdf/decl-incompat-tabl.pdfhttp://www.dca.gov.uk/ peoples-rights/human-rights/pdf/decl-incompat-tabl.pdf accessed 30 October, 2008; Ministry of Justice 2009. My pre´cis of subject descriptions. Disregards two declarations in respect of provisions (discriminating against widowers) that had already been repealed, seven declarations issued but overturned by a higher court, and two under appeal at the time of the most recent list.

Fertilisation and Embryology (Deceased Fathers) Act 2003. One would have to have a heart of stone not to think that Act a good deed in a wicked world. Another monitor is the refreshingly bad-tempered annual reports of the Joint Committee [of the two houses of Parliament] on Human Rights and the Government responses (latest at JCHR 2008 and Ministry of Justice 2009). These discuss both the DoIs and individual judgments against the UK at the Strasbourg court. In its latest report, the Joint Committee waspishly notes that: In our previous reports, we have drawn attention to a number of cases where significant delay in implementation has tarnished the otherwise good record of the United Kingdom in responding to the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. For the most part, these cases have been legally straightforward, but politically difficult. (Joint Committee on Human Rights 2008: paragraph 4.62)

This encapsulates the political problem of human rights. Usually, they are the rights of the deeply unpopular. In Chapter 14, I will return to the vexed question of what an eminent US Supreme Court Justice, Harlan Stone, called ‘discrete and insular minorities’ that might need special protection from majoritarian legislatures. Comity requires separation of powers. Paeans to the general wonderfulness of the British Constitution since (and including) Bagehot have enjoyed pointing out that Montesquieu got Britain wrong. The efficient secret of government in Britain was the fusion, not the separation, of executive and legislature. But Bagehot’s praise cannot be extended to the fusion of government and judiciary. The position of Lord Chancellor, who until 2005 straddled all three

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branches, became intolerably anomalous in the human rights era. The Lord Chancellor simultaneously presided over a house of the legislature (the Lords); directed the judiciary; and was a senior member of the executive as a Cabinet Minister.5 The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 ends these anomalies, although the circumstances of its introduction were extremely messy. It makes comity possible by fully separating the executive from the judiciary.

A B R I T IS H B I L L O F RI G H T S ? The 1998 Act has not been incorporated into the hearts and minds of the British people. At the time of writing, the policy of the Conservative Party is to repeal it and replace it by a British Bill of Rights.6 Human rights lawyers and civil libertarians have been sceptical about this policy. Unless accompanied by withdrawal from the ECHR, the effect of such a repeal would merely be to restore the situation as it was between 1966 and 1998, namely, that UK citizens who felt their human rights had been violated could go to Strasbourg for a remedy. It is unlikely that it would lead UK judges to change their recent practice of taking into account the human rights implications of the cases before them. And if British Conservatives did withdraw from the ECHR, they would be abandoning an institution created by British Conservatives in the shadow of Nazism and communism. But if bad law, the Conservatives’ proposal is good politics. Other parties are making similar noises about a British Bill of Rights—although the other parties’ bills would add to, rather than subtract from, the ECHR rights. For human rights to be entrenched, there has to be a sort of magical transformation of the sort that has occurred in the United States and Canada. Those countries’ entrenched protections of human rights (respectively the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the Canada Charter of Rights and Freedoms) are overwhelmingly popular. But there is no reason to suppose that the marginal people whose rights they directly protect, including migrants, criminals, and those with unusual sexual tastes, are any more popular in those countries than elsewhere. The magical transformation is that people, seemingly, love their constitutions without knowing what is in them. The legal NGO Justice recently published a weighty report on how a British Bill of Rights might be enacted, and how it might go beyond the ECHR (Justice 2007). Unusually for an NGO report, it can be reached directly from the web page of the Ministry of Justice. In devastatingly polite footnotes, it reveals the incoherence of Conservative policy (although Conservative lawyers served on it). The public lawyers and constitutionally minded political scientists who

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served on the Justice committee were clear that a British Bill of Rights could only add to, not subtract from, ECHR rights. A Bill of Rights drafted nowadays would differ from that of 1950. For instance, a modern bill would be unlikely to permit the ‘lawful detention of persons for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts or vagrants’, as the 1950 document does. As Justice crisply says, a modern code would not imprison people ‘merely for what they are rather than for what they have done’.7 It might also add rights not to suffer discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation; and restrictions on surveillance. This book is not about futurology. But I nevertheless predict that the rapid rise of human rights jurisprudence in the United Kingdom is unlikely to be reversed under a government of any political complexion. In Chapter 14, I will return to the question: if rights are to be entrenched, should it be by the indirect ‘interpret consistently with Convention, failing which declare incompatibility’ route studied in this chapter, or by the direct disapplication of statute, as studied in the EU cases discussed in Chapter 9?

App e n d i x to Ch a pt e r 1 0 European Convention on Human Rights and Protocols Adopted by the United Kingdom as of 2008 Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights and Protocols given further effect by the United Kingdom under Schedule 1 of the Human Rights Act 1998. List as of 2008. Part I THE CONVENTION Rights and Freedoms Article 2 Right to life 1. Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law. (No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law). [this sentence superseded by Thirteenth Protocol, see below] 2. Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this Article when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary: (a) in defence of any person from unlawful violence (b) in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained (c) in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection. Article 3 Prohibition of torture No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Article 4 Prohibition of slavery and forced labour 1. No one shall be held in slavery or servitude. 2. No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour. 3. For the purpose of this Article the term ‘forced or compulsory labour’ shall not include: (a) any work required to be done in the ordinary course of detention imposed according to the provisions of Article 5 of this Convention or during conditional release from such detention

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(b) any service of a military character or, in case of conscientious objectors in countries where they are recognised, service exacted instead of compulsory military service (c) any service exacted in case of an emergency or calamity threatening the life or well-being of the community (d) any work or service which forms part of normal civic obligations. Article 5 Right to liberty and security 1. Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be deprived of his liberty save in the following cases and in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law: (a) the lawful detention of a person after conviction by a competent court (b) the lawful arrest or detention of a person for non-compliance with the lawful order of a court or in order to secure the fulfilment of any obligation prescribed by law (c) the lawful arrest or detention of a person effected for the purpose of bringing him before the competent legal authority on reasonable suspicion of having committed an offence or when it is reasonably considered necessary to prevent his committing an offence or fleeing after having done so (d) the detention of a minor by lawful order for the purpose of educational supervision or his lawful detention for the purpose of bringing him before the competent legal authority (e) the lawful detention of persons for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases, of persons of unsound mind, alcoholics or drug addicts or vagrants (f) the lawful arrest or detention of a person to prevent his effecting an unauthorised entry into the country or of a person against whom action is being taken with a view to deportation or extradition. 2. Everyone who is arrested shall be informed promptly, in a language which he understands, of the reasons for his arrest and of any charge against him. 3. Everyone arrested or detained in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 1(c) of this Article shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorised by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial. Release may be conditioned by guarantees to appear for trial. 4. Everyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings by which the lawfulness of his detention shall be decided speedily by a court and his release ordered if the detention is not lawful. 5. Everyone who has been the victim of arrest or detention in contravention of the provisions of this Article shall have an enforceable right to compensation.

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Article 6 Right to a fair trial 1. In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law. Judgment shall be pronounced publicly but the press and public may be excluded from all or part of the trial in the interest of morals, public order or national security in a democratic society, where the interests of juveniles or the protection of the private life of the parties so require, or to the extent strictly necessary in the opinion of the court in special circumstances where publicity would prejudice the interests of justice. 2. Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law. 3. Everyone charged with a criminal offence has the following minimum rights: (a) to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him (b) to have adequate time and facilities for the preparation of his defence (c) to defend himself in person or through legal assistance of his own choosing or, if he has not sufficient means to pay for legal assistance, to be given it free when the interests of justice so require (d) to examine or have examined witnesses against him and to obtain the attendance and examination of witnesses on his behalf under the same conditions as witnesses against him (e) to have the free assistance of an interpreter if he cannot understand or speak the language used in court. Article 7 No punishment without law 1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offence was committed. 2. This Article shall not prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal according to the general principles of law recognised by civilised nations. Article 8 Right to respect for private and family life 1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

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2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Article 9 Freedom of thought, conscience and religion 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance. 2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. Article 10 Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. Article 11 Freedom of assembly and association 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests. 2. No restrictions shall be placed on the exercise of these rights other than such as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the

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protection of health or morals or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others. This Article shall not prevent the imposition of lawful restrictions on the exercise of these rights by members of the armed forces, of the police or of the administration of the State. Article 12 Right to marry Men and women of marriageable age have the right to marry and to found a family, according to the national laws governing the exercise of this right. Article 14 Prohibition of discrimination The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status. Article 16 Restrictions on political activity of aliens Nothing in Articles 10, 11 and 14 shall be regarded as preventing the High Contracting Parties from imposing restrictions on the political activity of aliens. Article 17 Prohibition of abuse of rights Nothing in this Convention may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein or at their limitation to a greater extent than is provided for in the Convention. Article 18 Limitation on use of restrictions on rights The restrictions permitted under this Convention to the said rights and freedoms shall not be applied for any purpose other than those for which they have been prescribed.

PART II THE FIRST PROTOCOL Article 1

Protection of property Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law.

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The preceding provisions shall not, however, in any way impair the right of a State to enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest or to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties. Article 2 Right to education No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions. Article 3 Right to free elections The High Contracting Parties undertake to hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.

ARTICLE 1 OF THE THIRTEENTH PROTOCOL Abolition of the death penalty The death penalty shall be abolished. No one shall be condemned to such penalty or executed.

Part IV Things to Leave Out of a Written Constitution

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11 Unelected Houses LORD MOUNTARARAT. This comes of women interfering in politics. It so happens that if there is an institution in Great Britain which is not susceptible of any improvement at all, it is the House of Peers! SONG—LORD MOUNTARARAT When Britain really ruled the waves – (In good Queen Bess’s time) The House of Peers made no pretence To intellectual eminence, Or scholarship sublime; Yet Britain won her proudest bays In good Queen Bess’s glorious days! When Wellington licked Bonaparte, As every child can tell, The House of Peers throughout the war Did nothing in particular And did it very well. Yet Britain set the world ablaze In good King George’s glorious days. And while the House of Peers withholds Its legislative hand, And noble statesmen do not itch To interfere in matters which They do not understand, As bright will shine Great Britain’s rays As in King George’s glorious days. (Gilbert 1882, Lord Mountararat’s Song, Act II)

AN UNELECTED UP PER HOUSE The United Kingdom’s Parliament, in the mouth of a lawyer (to quote Dicey 1885: 37 one more time) comprises three chambers. Two of them are unelected: the House of Lords and the monarch. This and the next chapter

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discuss how these two chambers might be reshaped if parliamentary sovereignty were to be replaced by a conception based on popular sovereignty. The English parliament was bicameral from high medieval times, except for a brief period under Cromwell, when it was first unicameral and then zero-cameral. Under feudalism, barons were deemed to hold their land from the king on condition that they performed military service when required. They passed the same reciprocal obligations on to their tenants. As the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords explains: With its origins in the medieval royal practice of summoning the great landowners (both lay and ecclesiastical) to offer counsel and provide resources, the House of Lords pre-dates the House of Commons by some centuries and it was long the pre-eminent House of Parliament. The House of Commons’ power over financial resources was evident as early as the 14th century, and it asserted its sole privilege in financial matters from the 17th century onwards. (Wakeham 2000a, 2.1)

Note: ‘both lay and ecclesiastical’. Medieval bishops sat in the Lords primarily because they owned land, not because they were spiritual advisers. Perhaps because feudalism was less developed in Scotland, where some land tenure remained ‘allodial’ (freehold) and there was no Norman Conquest, the Scottish Parliament before 1707 was unicameral. The Irish Parliament before 1800 was bicameral. At the two Unions, Scotland and Ireland were assigned a number of ‘representative peers’ (sixteen for Scotland and twenty-eight for Ireland), to be chosen, indeed, by their peers, to sit in the enlarged House of Lords. For Ireland, this system ended with independence in 1922; for Scotland, it ended in 1963. From then until 1999, all Scottish peers could sit in the House of Lords. As already noted in the Introduction, some of the officers of Cromwell’s army debated representation in Putney Church in October 1647. The ‘Levellers’ had produced a document called ‘An agreement of the people for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right and freedom’. Commissary-General Henry Ireton: . . . It is said they [MPs] are to be distributed according to the number of inhabitants. This does make me think that the meaning is that every man that is an inhabitant is to be equally considered, and to have an equal voice in the election of representers . . . and if that be the meaning then I have something to say against it. Maximilian Petty: We judge that all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections. Colonel Thomas Rainborough: I desired that those that had engaged in it might be included. For really I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear

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that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under. (Sharp 1998: 102–3)

Colonel Rainborough’s ideas were reformulated by John Locke and the American revolutionaries. But in their native land, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, General Ireton’s views overrode Colonel Rainborough’s at least until the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832. The nineteenth-century reform acts forced the issues raised at Putney back on to the political agenda. However, the renewed Putney debate beginning in 1831 did not take the form of calls for an elected Lords or monarchy. Rather, the argument went as follows: given that one house of Parliament was elected (by a broadening franchise as the century wore on), ought not the unelected house, and the monarchy, to defer to it? The idea that the Commons held the primacy over supply, in particular, already familiar to Rainborough and his contemporaries, was imported into the US and Australian Constitutions, was challenged in 1909, and was finally reaffirmed in 1911. The constitutional crisis of 1832 was resolved by the Lords’ and King William IV’s surrender to the Commons, where the Whigs under Earl Grey had a huge majority. Threatened with the mass creation of peers, and civil disturbance in the streets, Tory peers abstained on the final voting and the Reform Act became law. As in 1911, no peers were actually created. The next constitutional crisis blew up only a dozen years later. The Duke of Wellington, who had been an unsuccessful Prime Minister as the Reform Bill crisis was brewing, discovered as leader of the Lords in the 1840s a deftness he had earlier lacked. The Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel (1841–6) deeply offended many of his own supporters, twice. In 1845 he proposed an enhanced grant to the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. This was anathema to what were called the Ultras—politicians who believed ardently in Protestant supremacy. They were stronger in the Lords than in the Commons. How could Wellington prevent them from defeating the government? After pretending not to hear an interruption from the Ultra Duke of Newcastle, who demanded that the proposal be dropped as being inconsistent with the Act of Succession, Wellington went on: There can be no doubt of the absolute necessity of finding some means of educating the Roman Catholic priests for the service of the Roman Catholic mission in Ireland. It was stated at the time this institution was founded, that the population of Ireland was 3,000,000. It has advanced to the amount

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? of 8,175,000—it was so in the year 1841, and probably it is now 8,500,000; and of that number, about the seven-eights are to be considered as Roman Catholics; and there can be no doubt whatsoever, whatever the numbers may be, that a very large proportion of the people in Ireland are Roman Catholics—that we cannot avoid their being Roman Catholics—and that we must find the means of providing them with ecclesiastics capable of administering to them the rites of the Roman Catholic Church—that we must have these ecclesiastics educated at home, or we must consent to and encourage the sending them abroad. (HL Deb 02 June 1845 vol 80 cc1160–1174)

On the even greater ‘betrayal’ of Repeal of the Corn Laws the following year, to which Wellington was personally opposed, he went further: My Lords, in the month of December last, I felt myself bound, by my duty to my Sovereign, not to withhold my assistance from the Government—not to decline to resume my seat in Her Majesty’s Councils—not to refuse to give my assistance to the Government of my right hon. Friend (Sir R. Peel)— knowing as I did, at the time, that my right hon. Friend could not do otherwise than propose to Parliament a measure of this description . . . I am in Her Majesty’s service—bound to Her Majesty and to the Sovereigns of this country by considerations of gratitude of which it is not necessary that I should say more to your Lordships . . . This measure, my Lords, was recommended by the Speech from the Throne, and it has been passed by a majority of the House of Commons, consisting of more than half the Members of that House . . . We know by the Votes that it has been passed by a majority of the House of Commons; we know that is recommended by the Crown; and we know that, if we should reject this Bill, it is a Bill which has been agreed to by the other two branches of the Legislature; and that the House of Lords stands alone in rejecting this measure. Now that, my Lords, is a situation in which I beg to remind your Lordships, I have frequently stated you ought not to stand; it is a position in which you cannot stand, because you are entirely powerless; without the House of Commons and the Crown, the House of Lords can do nothing. (HL Deb 28 May 1846 vol 86 cc1401–05. My emphasis.)

Thus Wellington in the 1840s claimed that if the House of Lords was isolated—on the opposite side to the Crown and the Commons—it ought not to press its opposition. It was not what he had said or thought earlier. Also, it could be objected (and was—for an example, see McLean 2001a: 54) that Wellington’s line left the Lords with nothing to do. That might have been good, as Gilbert’s Lord Mountararat was to observe in 1882. But the alternative carried an opposite risk.

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Consider some vulgar Marxist analysis of class interests. Until 1958 there were only three ways to become a member of the House of Lords: to become a bishop, or a senior judge, or (the overwhelmingly predominant route) to inherit a title. Titles go, by the rules of succession, to the eldest son of the previous title-holder. So, generally, did landed estates in the British Isles, despite the protests of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and many other thinkers of the Enlightenment that there was neither economic nor moral basis for this practice, known as ‘primogeniture’. The economic effect of primogeniture was that landed estates were not often split up, but went to a sole inheritor from generation to generation. Therefore the House of Lords became, not merely a landed house, but a house comprising, on average, the wealthiest landowners in the United Kingdom. The Industrial Revolution changed this less than might be expected. True, it shifted economic activity to cities and mining villages: But they, too, sit on land, and land was usually owned by a large landowner. The traditional aristocracy cornered substantial income streams from mining (e.g. the Earls of Bute and the Marquesses of Londonderry) and urban development (e.g. the Dukes of Devonshire and Westminster). It follows that the interests of the class most likely to be found in the House of Lords were overwhelmingly landed. We saw earlier what this caused them to do to the 1909 Budget. Wellington’s policy of ensuring that the House of Peers withheld its legislative hand was continued by his immediate successors. It was changed by Lord Cranborne, later the third Marquess of Salisbury, a leading Conservative peer from 1868, Tory leader from 1880, and Prime Minister four times between 1885 and 1902. Salisbury’s first action was a managed retreat, over the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland. The Liberals had made it a prominent campaign issue in the 1868 general election, which they won. Before that election, the Liberals had won a Commons vote on the issue, but Salisbury had directly argued against the Wellington doctrine. My Lords, it occurs to me to ask the noble Earl whether he has considered for what purpose this House exists, and whether he would be willing to go through the humiliation of being a mere echo and supple tool of the other House in order to secure for himself the luxury of mock legislation? I agree with my noble Friend the noble Earl (the Earl of Derby) below me that it were better not to be than submit to such a slavery. . . .[O]n these rare and great occasions, on which the national mind has fully declared itself, I do not doubt your Lordships would yield to the opinion of the country— otherwise the machinery of Government could not be carried on. But there is an enormous step between that and being the mere echo of the House of Commons. (HL Deb 26 June 1868 vol 193 c.89)

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However, after the general election Salisbury recognized, against his personal interests and tastes as a high Tory, that the Liberal government now had the right to pursue Irish disestablishment. He echoed his own ‘mere echo’ speech, this time saying: If we do merely echo the House of Commons, the sooner we disappear the better. The object of the existence of a second House of Parliament is to supply the omissions and correct the defects which occur in the proceedings of the first. But it is perfectly true that there may be occasions in our history in which the decision of the House of Commons and the decision of the nation must be taken as practically the same. (HL Deb 17 June 1869 vol 197 cc83–4HL Deb 17 June 1869 vol 197 cc18–118)

Irish disestablishment was such a case, as it was the specific platform on which the Liberals under Gladstone had gone to the country and won. Salisbury therefore sought an alternative basis for Lords’ resistance. By 1872 he had found it: The plan which I prefer is frankly to acknowledge that the nation is our Master, though the House of Commons is not, and to yield our opinion only when the judgement of the nation has been challenged at the polls and decidedly expressed. This doctrine, it seems to me, has the advantage of being: (1) Theoretically sound. (2) Popular. (3) Safe against agitation, and (4) so rarely applicable as practically to place little fetter upon our independence. (Salisbury to Lord Carnarvon, 20.02.1872, in Cecil 1921–32, vol. 2, 25–6)

Salisbury had thus neatly moved from accepting Commons supremacy when the general election had conferred a mandate, to accepting it only when a general election had called a mandate. In his typically clear and cynical way, he thought this would arise ‘so rarely as practically to place little fetter upon our independence’. But, the vulgar Marxist may note, class conflict in the Parliament intensified after 1868. As the franchise extended in 1867 and 1884, so the economic interest of the median voter moved further down the income distribution. Increasingly the Conservatives became the party of capital as well as the party of land. Gladstone, as socially conservative as he was politically radical, continued to respect the monarchy and the Whig aristocracy, which did not reciprocate. More and more Whig peers became Tories, including peers created or advanced by Gladstone himself; and the flow became a flood after Gladstone became converted to the cause of Irish Home Rule in 1885. As Liberalism moved left, Salisbury’s Conservatism became more and more reactionary, using that word non-emotively. His own colleagues wondered whether he was pushing the Lords too far. W. S. Gilbert, who poured his

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satirical scorn equally on all parties, may have been implying this in his most political libretto, Iolanthe (1882)—notably when he has Lord Mountararat sing (to Sullivan’s magnificent music) his paean to the uselessness of the House of Peers. The sublime pairing of Sullivan’s big tunes and Gilbert’s mordant satire has two other peaks: the Sentry’s Song, also in Iolanthe (‘every boy and every gal/That’s born into the world alive/Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative’), and the Boatswain’s Song in HMS Pinafore (‘But, in spite of all temptations/To belong to other nations/He remains an Englishman’). However, any confrontation between the houses was delayed by the Liberal split of 1886 over Irish Home Rule. The partisan effect of the split was to weaken the Liberals in both houses. In the Commons they had a bare majority in the Parliament of 1892–5, dependent on the Irish Party and insufficient to lead a ‘Peers against the People’ appeal against the Lords’ rejection of the second Irish Home Rule Bill by 419 to 41. That rejection had in turn become inevitable because by 1893 almost all the Whig peers had become Unionists (the name the Conservatives and their Liberal Unionist allies took between 1887 and 1914). Salisbury’s own views about Irish Catholics were pungent: You would not confide free representative institutions to the Hottentots, for instance. . . When you come to narrow it down you will find that this,— which is called self-government but is really government by the majority,— works admirably when it is confided to people who are of Teutonic race, but that it does not work so well when people of other races are called upon to join it. (Speech at St James’ Hall, 15.05.1886, in Cecil 1921–32, 3:302; See Bentley 2001: 235.)

After his death, this attitude—shared by many of his successors—combined with his doctrine of the mandate to give the Unionists the unshakeable assurance, discussed in earlier chapters, that they and not the elected house of Parliament represented the will of the people. This proposition was never tested in a general election. Therefore, the only evidence bearing on it is the trend of by-elections in the Parliament of 1910–14. Figure 11.1 shows the trend, where the variations in individual by-election results are smoothed by grouping the by-elections into twomonth periods. Throughout the constitutional crisis, Unionists insisted that they represented the voice of the people; that the Liberals had no mandate for Irish Home Rule; and that therefore the conditions for Lords’ deference to the Commons were not met. Dicey wrote to Bonar Law, proposing:

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? Unionist vote (based on the by-elections 1910 –1914)

60 58 56 54

%

52 50 48 46 44 42 April/ May 1914

February/ March 1914

December/ January 1914

October/ November 1913

June/ July 1913

August/ September 1913

April/ May 1913

February/ March 1913

December/ January 1913

October/ November 1912

June/ July 1912

August/ September 1912

April/ May 1912

February/ March 1912

December/ January 1912

October/ November 1911

June/ July 1911

August/ September 1911

April/ May 1911

December 1910 GE

February/ March 1911

40

Figure 11.1 Unionist share of the vote in by-elections, December 1910–August 1914 (grouped). (Source: Our calculations from Craig 1974. By-elections in Ireland excluded.)

The National Insurance Act 1911 was enacted on 6 December, having been widely discussed during the year. Its sections were gradually brought into operation during 1912. The Marconi ‘scandal’ broke in summer 1912 in the shape of allegations that government ministers including Lloyd George had benefited from insider trading in the shares of the Marconi wireless company. It ended with a parliamentary select committee report in June 1913 which divided on party lines. The majority cleared Lloyd George and his colleagues of wrongdoing. The Irish constitutional crisis became gradually more acute during 1913 and 1914. The Curragh ‘mutiny’ took place on 20.03.14; the Larne gunrunning on 24– 25.04.14.

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1. 2. 3. 4.

the presentation of petitions for a dissolution; the constant holding of meetings in favour of it; the clamour of it at every contested election; the subordination of every other object to the obtaining of a dissolution; and 5. the gaining if possible of contested elections. (A. V. Dicey to A. Bonar Law 28.03,13, BLP 29/2/45, cited by Smith 1993: 165) Liberals, including Prime Minister Asquith, insisted that the December 1910 election was acknowledged by both sides to be about Home Rule; that there was no evidence that the country had rejected the Liberals; and that were a general election to be called, it might be dominated not by Home Rule but by ‘the Insurance Act, the Marconi contract, and a score of other “issues” which happened for the moment to preoccupy public attention’ (Asquith to George V, [19].09.1913, Appendix to Chapter 12). Figure 11.1 enables us to test these claims. The overall picture is that following a mid-term loss of popularity (normal in the United Kingdom, and observed in almost every parliament since democracy began), the Liberals and allies were in the same position at the outbreak of war in August 1914 as they had occupied at the December 1910 general election. The dates of the Insurance Act and the Marconi ‘scandal’ are given in the source notes to Figure 11.1. There appears to be a correlation between the Insurance Bill/Act being under discussion and relative Liberal success; between Marconi being under discussion and relative Unionist success; and between the increased Unionist militancy over Ireland and a sharp reversal of Unionist fortunes. As far as they go, the data vindicate Asquith and do not support the Unionists’ claims to represent the people. Dicey’s proposed strategy was doomed. Therefore he and Law were forced to suggest undemocratic means of halting Home Rule, via the Lords, the king, the Army, and the paramilitaries. After the cataclysmic events of 1909–14, proponents of Salisbury’s mandate theory went quiet for three decades. The Labour governments of 1924 and 1929–31 were both minority governments, so it was difficult to frame disputes between the houses as ‘peers against people’ arguments. However, the issue returned in full force with the results of the 1945 general election, which returned a Labour government in the Commons with a majority of 156 over all other parties put together. In the Lords, Labour was, in the words of Viscount Addison, Leader of the House, ‘but a tiny atoll in the vast ocean of Tory reaction’ (quoted by Morgan and Morgan 1980: 252). The Conservative leader in the House of Lords was Lord Cranborne, grandson of the third Marquess of Salisbury, and later to become fifth Marquess. He had a good relationship with Addison (who was much older

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

and had first been a minister in 1914) and was, initially, much more accommodating than his grandfather. In the 1945 debate on the King’s speech introducing the Labour government’s nationalization programme in the Lords, he said: Whatever our personal views, we should frankly recognize that these proposals were put before the country at the recent General Election and that the people of this country, with full knowledge of these proposals, returned the Labour Party to power. The Government may, therefore, I think, fairly claim that they have a mandate to introduce these proposals. I believe that it would be constitutionally wrong, when the country has so recently expressed its view, for this House to oppose proposals which have been definitely put before the electorate. (HL Deb 16 August 1945 vol 137 c47)

Although hedged about with qualifications, this is much milder, and more deferential to the elected house, than his grandfather’s views. It is this which is generally now called the ‘Salisbury’ or ‘Salisbury–Addison’ convention. As a convention, it has no written form except Cranborne’s speech, and in books and articles which discuss this, including a helpful House of Lords Library Note (Dymond and Deadman 2006). It is generally interpreted to imply that the Lords do not vote on second or third reading against a government manifesto bill, and that they do not agree to ‘wrecking amendments’ to such a bill. Relations worsened later in the 1945–51 government. On his side, Addison pointed out that the doctrine could not cover issues which came up during the lifetime of the government, such as Indian independence. On his, Cranborne (now the 5th Marquess of Salisbury) complained that what became the 1949 Parliament Act did not come under the terms of his 1945 statement. The Parliament Bill was itself introduced because ministers anticipated that the Conservatives would claim that the bill for iron and steel nationalization was not covered by the terms of the agreement, and that time would run out in the 1945 Parliament before iron and steel nationalization could be carried without Lords’ consent under the terms of the 1911 Act. The 1949 Act therefore reduced the time required for a bill to be presented without Lords’ consent from two full sessions to one. The parties never reached full agreement on whether the 1949 bill was itself covered by either the Salisbury–Addison convention or the Parliament Act (Parliament Bill: Agreed Statement 1948; Morris-Jones 1948). The Parliament Act 1949 was in the end enacted under the procedures of the 1911 Act without Lords’ consent. A recent Law Lords’ judgment has rejected the contention that the 1949 Act was itself not validly carried under the terms of the 1911 Act (R. [on the application of Jackson] v. Att.-Gen. [2005] UKHL 56; [2006] I. A.C. 262).

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One more reform to the unelected House was significant before we move on to the modern situation. Legislation in 1958 enabled life peers to be created. This had several consequences: 1. It reduced the Conservative predominance in the Lords, as all parties nominated their supporters (including retired MPs and ministers) for life peerages. 2. An informal convention grew up that party leaders in the Commons could nominate new partisan life peers in rough proportion to their strengths (in seats, not in votes) in the Commons. Thus it arose that all the main parties (and also some minor parties, including Ulster Unionists) had a cadre of working peers, most of those being life peers. 3. By 1997 the majority of members of the House of Lords were life peers.

DEVELOPMENTS SINCE 1997 The changes that have taken place in the House of Lords since 1997 are as great as any since the seventeenth century, with the sole exception of the Parliament Act 1911. The Labour manifesto for the 1997 election promised to ‘end the hereditary principle in the House of Lords’. It went on: As an initial, self-contained reform, not dependent on further reform in the future, the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute. This will be the first stage in a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative. The legislative powers of the House of Lords will remain unaltered. The system of appointment of life peers to the House of Lords will be reviewed. Our objective will be to ensure that over time party appointees as life peers more accurately reflect the proportion of votes cast at the previous general election. We are committed to maintaining an independent crossbench presence of life peers. No one political party should seek a majority in the House of Lords. A committee of both Houses of Parliament will be appointed to undertake a wide-ranging review of possible further change and then to bring forward proposals for reform. We have no plans to replace the monarchy. (Labour Party 1997)

If anything was covered by the Salisbury–Addison convention, therefore, the House of Lords Act 1999, was designed to end the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the Lords. It passed the Lords without serious trouble, except that,

234

What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

in a backstairs deal between 10 Downing Street and Lord Cranborne (the Conservative leader in the Lords, grandson of the Cranborne/Salisbury of 1945, and great-great-grandson of the Prime Minister), ninety-two hereditary peers were to remain until the second phase of reform had been completed. Lord Cranborne was sacked by his leader, William Hague, for this, but the hereditaries do remain. Some of them have started to claim that they are the most legitimate members of the house, because they have been elected by their peers. Although the victorious party’s manifesto had spoken of making the upper house ‘more democratic and representative’, Prime Minister Tony Blair dragged his feet, with the mostly silent connivance of many of his colleagues. As Leader of the Opposition, Blair had said in the John Smith Memorial Lecture in 1996 that ‘Labour has always supported an elected upper house.’ Strictly, this did not imply that he favoured an elected upper house. It was also not true (Dorey 2008). It soon became clear, on his election as Prime Minister, that he did not support an elected upper house, and the Smith Memorial Lecture, with its potentially embarrassing statement, disappeared from sight. (Literally, a thorough Google search has failed to find any trace of it.) The Labour government appointed a Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords, chaired by Lord Wakeham, a former Conservative Cabinet Minister. The Committee reported in 2000. It recommended an upper house of about 550 members. Only a minority of those should be elected, however. The Royal Commission presented three models: under one, there would be 65 elected members; under the second, favoured by ‘a substantial majority of the Commission’ (Wakeham 2000b: 13), there would be 87 under the third, there would be 195 elected members. The Labour Party’s evidence to Wakeham had attempted to square the circle of calling for a ‘representative’ upper house without actually calling for it to be elected. The reformed House of Lords must be fully representative—it should fairly represent political opinion in the country, it should be representative of the different interests in the country (such as business, labour, education, science and the arts), and it should be representative of the people as a whole. . . [R]eform of the House of Lords should address questions such as the age, gender, and ethnic composition of its membership, and how fairer representation can best be secured. (Labour Party 1999, paragraph 5.5)

It would thus fall to a proposed independent Appointments Commission to ensure that the new upper house would be ‘representative’ in this microcosmic, and functionalist, sense. The Wakeham Commission went further. Containing as it did a bishop who was a member of the House of Lords, it managed to persuade itself that 16 Church of England bishops should remain in the reformed upper house. It recognized that there were other faith

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communities in the United Kingdom, and suggested that a further 15 religious representatives should be appointed: five to represent other Christian denominations in England; five religious representatives from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and five to represent non-Christian faiths (Wakeham 2000a, Recommendations 109–10.) This pair of recommendations was so problematic that it cast a bright light on the whole murky concept of non-democratic representativeness, as proposed in the Labour Party’s evidence. Dealing first with religious representation, and working up from the smallest issue: 1. Would Northern Ireland have one faith representative, or two? In population terms it would be entitled to only one; but the idea that two confessional communities of comparable size, with a 300-year history of sectarian conflict, might be comfortable with a single representative of faith was absurd. 2. Where did Wakeham get its numbers on the comparative size of faith communities? They were at odds with other data sources, and the 2001 Census later confirmed that Wakeham’s numbers were wrong. McLean and Linsley (2004, Table 2), using National Statistics data that were available at the time of the Wakeham Report, showed that to scale up from Wakeham’s proposed 16 Church of England bishops would have required 77 representatives of faith communities in total. This issue is discussed in Chapter 13. 3. Did guaranteed representation for people of faith not also imply guaranteed representation for people of no faith? 4. How could non-democratic representation cope with multiple criteria? For instance, a high proportion of those 77 faith representatives would have to be female, to comply with the suggestion that the new upper house should have a more equal gender balance, given that all 16 of the Church of England bishops would be male. 5. Microcosmic representation by the multiple criteria proposed in the Labour Party’s evidence would be difficult, if not impossible. An Appointments Commission would have to secure an unelected house that was nevertheless simultaneously representative by age, gender, region, political opinion, ethnicity, and sector of the economy. This would require the UK population to be disaggregated into groups some of which are so small that the Appointments Commission would struggle to fund suitable candidates. The Labour Party’s evidence and Wakeham’s recommendations on religious representation therefore fulfil an intellectually useful role. They show that representation without democracy is unachievable. If a replacement for the House of Lords is to represent the people, it must be elected by the people.

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

This was, of course, exactly what many politicians in governing parties most feared. Labour politicians feared it most, because the House of Lords, overwhelmingly Conservative until 1999, had caused governments of the left far more trouble than governments of the right. A natural reaction is therefore unicameralism—the belief that there should be only one chamber of Parliament. But unicameralism allied to the United Kingdom’s electoral system and the tradition of parliamentary sovereignty is a triply toxic brew. The electoral system typically exaggerates the lead of the largest single party; that in itself may aid rather than hamper parliamentary sovereignty. However, in UK conditions it is also possible that the winner in terms of votes is not the winner in terms of seats. This happened after the general elections of 1951 and February 1974. The direction of bias varies from time to time, but under current conditions it favours Labour. It would be possible for Labour to win a plurality—perhaps even a majority—of Commons seats while coming second to the Conservatives in votes. When the equivalent situation arose in the United States after the Presidential Election of 1876, it came close to reigniting the Civil War: peace was maintained though a grubby bargain such that the Democrats would not press their claim to the presidency, which they had won on the popular vote, on condition that the incoming Republican administration allowed the white Democrats to regain control of state governments throughout the Confederacy. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Conservative politician Lord Hailsham (1976) called this triple toxicity ‘elective dictatorship’ when in opposition. Once the Conservatives were returned to government in 1979, however, Hailsham managed to live with it again, confirming the wisdom of Asquith’s statement to George V in 1913: When the two Houses are in agreement (as is always the case when there is a Conservative majority in the House of Commons), the [Parliament] Act is a dead letter. Labour politicians worried more, and with good reason, about the wrecking potential of the Lords: held in check essentially only by a speech in the Lords by Lord Cranborne in 1945. One response is abolition of the Lords. This made the Labour manifesto in 1983, (Labour Party 1983, in The Times 1983: 307), the year of Labour’s worst general election defeat. After that, it did not resurface as an overt aim of Labour leaders. The process was more subtle. For as long as the Lords remained an unelected house with hugely disproportionate Conservative tendencies, for so long the Salisbury Convention remained secure and a Labour government could expect to get most of its legislation through. Any threat by the Lords to use their formal powers would meet the response: ‘We are the elected house. You have no legitimacy.’ An elected, or largely elected, Lords would destroy this equilibrium. Thus, Tony Blair and the Labour leadership were led into the intellectual contortions just described.

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But they failed to control subsequent events, even though they held commanding leads in the Parliaments of 1997 and 2001, and a still substantial lead in the Parliament of 2005. The idea of an unelected upper house has been more and more laughed out of court since 1999. A succession of Green Papers, White Papers, and reports from academics and think tanks has left the Wakeham Report dead in the water. In 1997 the Liberal Democrats were calling for a predominantly elected upper house (as they had, after all, been doing since 1911). Perhaps more surprisingly, the Conservatives joined them for the 2001 election. They had appointed a commission under Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a former Lord Chancellor (and, as may be relevant, a Scottish independent Presbyterian). The Mackay Commission reported in 1999 (‘In the light of the quickening pace of progress towards Lords reform, the Constitutional Commission has decided to report early,’ their report opens. (Mackay 1999, Executive Summary: 1). They threw into the debate on upper house reform a number of ideas that have stayed there. Most importantly, they recommended that Senators should serve a single non-renewable term of three parliaments (with provision that if a parliament was exceptionally short, like that of February to October 1974, a resolution of both Houses could allow upper house members to serve for a fourth parliament (Mackay 1999, paragraph 44). That was a neat solution to four classic problems at once. 1. Unicameralists, open and covert, have always worried that an upper house elected at different times to the Commons would claim greater legitimacy. It is a sociological law that the government of the day, in all democracies, is unpopular at mid-term. The Parliament of 1910 provides an example (Figure 11.1). Therefore in a typical election that does not coincide with the election to the lower house, the current opposition will do well. It will then be tempted to claim that it represents the true voice of the people. 2. On the other hand, if elections to the two houses do coincide, then, in the words of the anti-reform Conservative peer and former minister Geoffrey Howe (Lord Howe of Aberavon), the upper house might be ‘clones of the clowns in the Commons’ (Hansard, Lords, 10.01.2002, c.699). His views echo Salisbury’s ‘mere echo’ of over a century earlier and they seem to be widely shared in the Lords, judging by their votes on their own reform. They would be especially clone-like if elected by the same electoral system as the Commons. 3. If the real locus of power is the Commons, then the upper house would risk being a refuge for failed and would-be Commons politicians. However, the long non-renewable terms proposed by Mackay and his colleagues would eliminate this risk.

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

Table 11.1 Mackay Commission models for a partly elected upper house.

Appointed members Members elected by devolved administrations and English regions Members elected from UK-wide party lists in proportion to the votes cast for the parties in the general election Members elected by thirds from eighty, six-member constituencies Life members Ex officio members

Model A

Model B

150 99

45

99 480 100 2 450

525

Source : Mackay Commission.

4. Relatedly, the long fixed term would weaken the power of the party whips over their party members in the upper house. They would not face re-election, and could therefore not be threatened with deselection. Unlike Wakeham the following year, Mackay and his colleagues were prepared to consider a predominantly, but not wholly, elected house. They offered two options (Table 11.1). Under either of Mackay’s options, more than half of the reformed upper house would be elected. Under what I have listed as Model A, 249 of its 450 members would be elected, either directly or indirectly. Under ‘Model B’, all but 45 of its 545 members would be directly elected. The appointed members would mostly be appointed for their expertise, but some could be political appointees, including (in Model B) government ministers. The weakest part of the Mackay report (in my view) was its proposals on electoral system. All three electoral systems proposed (indirect election, election by party list, and election in two-member districts) suffer from serious flaws, which seem to have been replicated in later Conservative thinking. However, that apart, the Mackay Commission report is perhaps the most intellectually distinguished proposal for upper house reform since 1997. The Conservative manifesto for 2001, although it did not mention the Mackay Commission report, called for a ‘substantial elected element’ in the upper house. In the 2001–5 Parliament, both houses voted on options for Lords reform. A series of reports and parliamentary motions had called for a higher elected proportion than in Wakeham (for details see McLean, Spirling, and Russell 2003). The houses appointed a joint committee which came up with various reform options from a wholly appointed to a wholly elected upper house. In 2003, the unelected Lords voted by a substantial majority for an unelected Lords. The story in the Commons was more complicated. In a series of

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Table 11.2 Votes in the House of Commons (including tellers) on Lords reform, 4 February 2003. Abolish

Aye Did not vote No Majority

Elect zero

Elect 20%

Elect 40%

Elect 50%

Elect 60%

Elect 80%

Elect all

174 29

247 23

0 0

0 0

0 0

255 22

283 26

274 30

392 218

325 78

595 595

595 595

595 595

318 63

286 3

291 17

Base: All who cast at least one vote; n = 595. Source : Division lists in Hansard (online version) for 4 February 2003.

Table 11.3 House of Lords reform: main party statements in the general election of 2005. Party

Statement

Conservative Labour

We will seek cross-party consensus for a substantially elected House of Lords. In our next term, we will complete the reform of the House of Lords so that it is a modern and effective revising Chamber. . . .[A] reformed Upper Chamber must be effective, legitimate and more representative without challenging the primacy of the House of Commons. Reform of the House of Lords has been botched by Labour, leaving it unelected and even more in the patronage of the Prime Minister. We will replace it with a predominantly elected second chamber.

Liberal Democrat

Note : The manifestos of the three next largest parties in the 2005 Parliament (SNP, DUP, and Plaid Cymru) made no mention of Lords reform. Source : Party websites; BBC Election 2005 site.

free votes, the Commons managed to contradict themselves. They voted against all eight options on offer, thus retaining the status quo. But the status quo was an all-appointed Lords, which they had opposed by 325 votes to 247 (Table 11.2). Elsewhere (McLean, Spirling, and Russell 2003) we have analysed the combination of confusion and strategic voting that seems to have led to this result. It was no doubt pleasing to Prime Minister Blair and the Labour Party whips, most of whom were organizing (in these supposedly free votes) to try to ensure the defeat of proposals for an elected upper house. Prime Minister Blair’s declared objection was that he did not like a ‘hybrid’ (part elected, part appointed) upper house, although that was precisely what the Royal Commission had proposed, and various Green and White Papers put out by his government had endorsed. Nevertheless, the parties continued to edge towards election. The statements made by the three main parties in their 2005 general election manifestos are given in Table 11.3.

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What’s Wrong with the British Constitution?

Labour still want a ‘representative’ upper house without committing themselves to an elected one. However, both the main opposition parties are now calling for a ‘substantially’ or ‘predominantly’ elected upper house. In 2007 both houses revisited the issue, again on free votes. The minister responsible (Jack Straw) proposed unsuccessfully to use a voting procedure designed to preclude a repetition of the contradictory outcome of the 2003 vote. The government issued a White Paper saying that it favoured a 50 per cent elected upper house. Once again, the unelected Lords voted by a substantial majority for an unelected Lords. However, the Commons as a whole, this time, produced a non-contradictory result (Table 11.4). Table 11.4 shows that in 2007 the Commons voted by 338 to 226 for a 100 per cent elected upper house, and by 306 to 269 for an 80 per cent elected house. The government’s preferred option did very badly, going down to heavy defeat and supported by a majority of MPs in none of the main parties. The party breakdown in the table shows that Liberal Democrats were the only main party to vote as a block—against unelected options and in favour of the maximally elected ones. Conservative MPs, despite their 2005 manifesto, voted by narrow pluralities against the maximally elected options. As a group, they did what the whole Commons had done in 2003: contradictorily voting for a bicameral parliament and then voting against all the compositions offered for the reformed upper house. Labour MPs voted most heavily for an all-elected house, and against the other composition options offered. The naive interpretation is that they were almost as thoroughgoing democrats as the Liberal Democrats. The more sophisticated interpretation, supported by careful analysis of the data (Constitution Unit 2007; Russell 2009), is that a number of Labour unicameralists voted strategically in favour of ‘all-elected’ in the hope of quietly wrecking reform. Further cross-party talks ensued. In July 2008, the Government issued a White Paper stating the results of these talks and the Government position on the issues (Ministry of Justice 2008). The headline message of this White Paper was that Lords reform would not proceed before the general election due in 2009 or 2010. This caused most of the UK media either to ignore the White Paper altogether or to treat it dismissively. This was myopic. The veto power of the Lords remains in full force during the last year or two of the Parliament. The Parliament of 2005 had reached that point by July 2008. The Lords had voted twice by large margins against becoming an elected house and it was therefore utterly predictable that any Lords reform bill in the 2005 Parliament would be vetoed by the Lords. There would not then be time to enact it on Commons votes only, under the Parliament Act 1949, before the dissolution of the 2005 Parliament. The statement that no Lords reform

Table 11.4 Divisions in the House of Commons on Lords reform 2007, by party. 67

68

69

70

71

72

50% elect

60% elect

80% elect

100% elect

rmve hereds (amend)

rmve heredits

66

65 Bicameral

Fully Apptd

Division

Aye

No

Aye

No

Aye

No

Aye

No

Aye

No

Aye

No

Party Con Lab LibDem SNP PC UU Ind/Other

182 169 60 6 3 1 2

1 155 0 0 0 0 1

80 117 0 0 3 1 3

103 201 61 6 0 0 0

26 129 0 0 0 0 1

155 189 63 6 3 1 2

42 135 0 0 0 0 2

139 184 60 6 3 0 1

80 159 62 0 3 0 2

98 164 0 6 0 0 1

57 212 59 6 3 0 1

126 98 0 0 0 0 2

Total

423

157

204

371

156

419

179

393

306

269

338

226

å p-value 2

168.88